Cruise’s robotaxi has traveled a million miles without anyone at the wheel

for self-driving car For developers, mileage is proof that the technology is working and an opportunity to collect data for further improvements.That’s why Cruise announced Reaching one million fully driverless miles is one of our biggest milestones to date. A spokesperson said they were driven for miles without a safety driver at the wheel and most of them were collected in San Francisco.

If you remember GM started a subsidiary Fully driverless test in the city I came back to November 2021We are also the first company to receive a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission to implement driverless driving. charge the passenger By June of last year, he had ridden a robotaxi.based on withdrawal report filed in California DMVthere were only about 30 cars in operation at the beginning of 2022. CNN said it maintained 100 vehicles by September last year and is looking to add another 5,000.

Mo Elshenawy, Cruise’s SVP of engineering, said each of these miles “packs a complex scenario to set Cruise up to scale.” Because the streets of San Francisco are often chaotic and packed with people, the company was able to collect a wealth of useful data that it could use to improve its technology. “For example,” El Shenawi wrote: blog Post, “Stop sign stairwells are 46 times more frequent in San Francisco than in suburban areas.”

Cruise feeds data from each drive into a continuous learning machine to create millions of permutations of real-world scenarios on the road. This allows technology to learn from the simulated drive and apply what it learns to real life. “Given our safety record, the importance of our team’s achievements becomes even more apparent,” Elshenawi continued. “To date, passengers have taken tens of thousands of cruise AV “In the next few years, millions of people will experience this fully autonomous future.”

Cruise announcement comes almost a month from San Francisco officials sent a letter We have asked California regulators to slow Cruise down (and Waymo’s) expansion plans. They reportedly want to get a better understanding of self-driving cars first and worry about “the dangers and network impacts caused by planned and unplanned AV outages that disrupt traffic.” was doing.As new york times Stalled Cruise and Waymo vehicles have caused traffic jams in San Francisco several times in the past, according to recent reports. thinking about. Failure to do so “could quickly deplete emergency response resources and undermine public confidence in all self-driving technology.”