Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Are Clocking in Miles Quicker than Ever

Alphabet’s autonomous vehicles now have more than three million miles on the clock.

byAaron Brown|
Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Are Clocking in Miles Quicker than Ever
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Waymo, Alphabet's firm that handles what was formerly the self-driving Google car project, is piling up test miles in on its autonomous cars faster than ever before. 

The test cars have driven one million miles in the past seven months, according to a tweet posted by Waymo on Tuesday. In October 2016, the company announced that it had raked in two million miles since its testing first launched. Before the two million mile announcement, Google shared that it reached the one million mile mark in July 2015. In other words, while the second million miles took 15 months to log, the third million took less than half that time. 

As Recode notes, though the mile numbers are relatively impressive, they don't share much information on how the cars are actually doing while out on the roads. Data such as disengagement rates that show how often the human behind the wheel had to take control, for example, can help to better lend insight into how Waymo's self-driving car project is coming along. But the more miles clocked in, the more data its engineers will be able to collect, thus allowing the cars to be more capable as time moves forward. 

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