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Waymo's Driverless Cars Have Logged 10 Million Miles On Public Roads (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Alphabet's driverless-car company Waymo announced a new milestone today (Oct. 10): its vehicles have driven a collective 10 million miles on U.S. roads. With cars in six states, Waymo has really been racking up the miles since April 2017, when it launched a program giving rides to passengers around the Phoenix, Arizona area. At that point, Waymo cars had driven not quite 3 million miles since the company's earliest days as a research project within Google in 2009. But in the last 18 months, the company more than tripled its road mileage.
Competing with other companies with autonomous-vehicle programs like Uber, Tesla, Apple, and GM's Cruise, Waymo is leading the pack in terms of road miles driven. [...] The company's next 10 million miles, CEO John Krafcik said in today's announcement, will focus on "striking the balance" between its safety-first algorithms and driving assertively in everyday maneuvers, like merging, and navigating bad weather. But it's worth keeping things in perspective: U.S. drivers rack up some 3 trillion miles each year, so Waymo still has some ground to cover.
Competing with other companies with autonomous-vehicle programs like Uber, Tesla, Apple, and GM's Cruise, Waymo is leading the pack in terms of road miles driven. [...] The company's next 10 million miles, CEO John Krafcik said in today's announcement, will focus on "striking the balance" between its safety-first algorithms and driving assertively in everyday maneuvers, like merging, and navigating bad weather. But it's worth keeping things in perspective: U.S. drivers rack up some 3 trillion miles each year, so Waymo still has some ground to cover.
Um, huh? Tesla's Autopilot had driven 1,2 billion miles as of July. Two orders of magnitude more than Waymo.
Uh, Tesla's "autopilot" is a driver assist, not a self-driving vehicle. And it racks up the miles on expressways-- that's the easy kind of driving.
So, no, not the same thing.
10 million miles is really nothing. In the US, there's only one fatal accident per 86 million miles on average.
Indeed, that's the metric to compare to. But not all miles driven are the same.
But it's worth keeping things in perspective: U.S. drivers rack up some 3 trillion miles each year, so Waymo still has some ground to cover.
Umm, WTF does this have to do with "keeping perspective"? It isn't a competition between Waymo and the rest of us human drivers to see who can rack up the most miles driven.