Photo: FCA & Waymo
Probably the most important part of developing a complete self-driving packaged that can actually work in the real world is having enough vehicles to test the technology out on the road.
That's why Tesla was so quick to launch the Autopilot and didn't back down despite plenty of people and institutions calling it unsafe after the unfortunate Joshua Brown incident from last year. And it's also why it currently has the largest database out of the many companies involved in this kind of research.
At the end of the day, its all down to the size of the testing fleet. With Tesla using its clients as willing guinea pigs and hundreds of thousand of cars each day on the road, it's already counting miles by hundreds of millions. Waymo, on the other hand, isn't as lucky.
The startup that spun off parent company Google much like Eve from Adam's rib (with the noticeable difference we know for a fact the former actually happened) has been using a relatively small fleet of Lexus SUVs and the infamous cartoon-like Google-Car. The project started more than seven years ago, and up until the split happened last December, the vehicles only managed to rack up two-million autonomous miles.
The new name brought with it a new fleet of 100 Chrysler Pacifica autonomous minivans that have been roaming the roads of several states. The new cars helped speed up the data collecting process significantly since one million of the three gathered so far during all these seven years have come in the last seven months.
Perhaps as a consequence of the growing number of autonomous miles, the Californian DMV reported that the number of times the engineers onboard had to intervene had dropped considerably. That might suggest the system is learning a lot faster now, and it could also explain why Waymo was bold enough to offer people rides in their test vehicles, even though the service is restricted only to Phoenix, Arizona.
No matter how many new vehicles join the Waymo fleet, it will never be able to record as many miles as Tesla. However, the Autopilot isn't exactly a fully-autonomous system, whereas Waymo's vehicles operate entirely on their own at all times. Only time will tell whether quality is more important than quantity in this case.
At the end of the day, its all down to the size of the testing fleet. With Tesla using its clients as willing guinea pigs and hundreds of thousand of cars each day on the road, it's already counting miles by hundreds of millions. Waymo, on the other hand, isn't as lucky.
The startup that spun off parent company Google much like Eve from Adam's rib (with the noticeable difference we know for a fact the former actually happened) has been using a relatively small fleet of Lexus SUVs and the infamous cartoon-like Google-Car. The project started more than seven years ago, and up until the split happened last December, the vehicles only managed to rack up two-million autonomous miles.
The new name brought with it a new fleet of 100 Chrysler Pacifica autonomous minivans that have been roaming the roads of several states. The new cars helped speed up the data collecting process significantly since one million of the three gathered so far during all these seven years have come in the last seven months.
Perhaps as a consequence of the growing number of autonomous miles, the Californian DMV reported that the number of times the engineers onboard had to intervene had dropped considerably. That might suggest the system is learning a lot faster now, and it could also explain why Waymo was bold enough to offer people rides in their test vehicles, even though the service is restricted only to Phoenix, Arizona.
No matter how many new vehicles join the Waymo fleet, it will never be able to record as many miles as Tesla. However, the Autopilot isn't exactly a fully-autonomous system, whereas Waymo's vehicles operate entirely on their own at all times. Only time will tell whether quality is more important than quantity in this case.
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