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Waymo's Driverless Cars Have Logged 10 Million Miles On Public Roads (qz.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the insert-pun-about-Waymo-driving-way-mo-miles-than-other-companies-here dept.

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.

6 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. covering ground being the operative word by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 3

    Even if they put 3 trillion miles on their system, if they confine it to just a few geographical areas, I don't trust it very much. I'd like to see them driving in NYC, Boston, Chicago, New Jersey (even humans can't figure this one out), etc. Places where public investment in the roadways has either been compromised (i.e. stolen by politician for other bullshit), minimal, or there simply wasn't enough space to put proper roads in, so they did something else instead...

    1. Re:covering ground being the operative word by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Funny

      Don't worry. Every slashdot comment is framed and hung up in the board room. True goldmine here.

    2. Re:covering ground being the operative word by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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."
    3. Re:covering ground being the operative word by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. Re:Huh? by XXongo · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Perspective? by sjbe · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.