Waymo's Autonomous Vehicles Are Driving 25,000 Miles Every Day (techcrunch.com)

With Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval at the National Governors Association, Waymo CEO John Krafcik announced a huge milestone: Waymo's fleet of self-driving vehicles are now logging 25,000 miles every day on public roads. The company reportedly has 600 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans on the road in 25 cities. Waymo has also driven 8 million miles on public roads using its autonomous vehicles, "meaning the comopany has been able to double the number of autonomous miles driven on public roads in just eight months," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The company also relies on simulation as it works to build an AI-based self-driving system that performs better than a human. In the past nine years, Waymo has "driven" more than 5 billion miles in its simulation, according to the company. That's the equivalent to 25,000 virtual cars driving all day, everyday, the company says. This newly shared goal signals Waymo is getting closer to launching a commercial driverless transportation service later this year. More than 400 residents in Phoenix have been trialing Waymo's technology by using an app to hail self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans. The company says it plans to launch its service later this year.

Comments

'Simulations' mean NOTHING

[Rick Schumann]

Neither does toodling around at 25mph or less.

amazing what tesla has taught the industry.

[WindBourne]

Hopefully, Waymo will catch up to Tesla and start giving them some competition.

Fully autonomous or sort of autonomous?

[Nkwe]

Are these miles fully autonomous (meaning no human in the car) or are the miles with assistance (human in the car, ready to take over or "assist")? If with assistance, what is the rate of help the cars get on some sort of statistic that can be compared over time? (Maybe "assists" per 1000 miles or something like that.) The statistic in the headline sounds impressive, but is it?

Re:Fully autonomous or sort of autonomous?

[complete loony]

Waymo autonomous cars drove 352,545 miles in California between December 2016 and November 2017, and disengaged from autonomous mode 63 times

No idea if the car was about to do something dangerous, or was disengaged because the driver got impatient. If the car chose to disengage, that's a small enough number that in areas with good data coverage, a driver in a single call center could take over remotely.

Re:Fully autonomous or sort of autonomous?

[David_Hart]

Are these miles fully autonomous (meaning no human in the car) or are the miles with assistance (human in the car, ready to take over or "assist")? If with assistance, what is the rate of help the cars get on some sort of statistic that can be compared over time? (Maybe "assists" per 1000 miles or something like that.)
The statistic in the headline sounds impressive, but is it?

It's also missing details such as weather, temperature, types of roads (i.e. pavement vs gravel), how well the roads are marked, traffic conditions, time of day, construction/road changes, amount of pedestrians/cyclists, etc.

Re:Fully autonomous or sort of autonomous?

[gweihir]

This is not the "proof of fitness" stage, this is still the "research" stage, so with human and, if done right, with additional safety features. This does mean that these systems can drop back to human control even when the automatics are just a bit concerned, but could actually handle the situation.

Death rate?

[Moof123]

With all that data in hand, what should we expect as a death rate compared to the current death rate in developed countries? How about pedestrian and cyclist fatality rate estimates? How about operator intervention rates on typical US roads (i.e. crappy poorly maintained and often mismarked)?

All those simulations and miles are just a big round number, I want to know what the scorecard looks like. If these things were near perfect there would be no need for such continued voluminous testing and refining.

Re:Death rate?

[gweihir]

We should expect something like 10% of what we have today. Sure, that is still a large number, but think of the improvement. Eventually, it may be much, much lower though, but that may take a few decades. This tech is hard.

Wow 25,000 miles a day?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's way mo' than I imagined!

Re:Really impressive

[gweihir]

Sorry to disappoint, these things are not "AI". They are just a result from around 50 years of dedicated, specialized automation research. And automation is a very, very old thing.

Re:safer, but not perfectly safe

[Gavagai80]

Choosing to travel by private car or tracked rideshare isn't mandatory. You can take public transit, ride your bike, walk, or catch a ride with a friend.

At any rate, license plate tracking cameras are just as much the death of driving privacy regardless of whether cars self-drive.