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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.
Waymo's system can't operate in an area where they haven't built a highly detailed 3D map. NYC isn't dramatically worse than San Francisco (which has plenty of bizarre traffic things, but it doesn't matter because the AI has a really good map. It knows what those things are), and Waymo has been operating in SF. If they can build the map, they can handle NY or Boston ok.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Small changes in the environment shouldn't matter. In the future, they could automatically make updates to the map using the 3D scans from all the cars passing points that show discrepancies in the old map. Maybe they're already doing that.