Waymo’s autonomous vehicles have driven 4M miles, last million over past six months

Abner Li | Nov 28 2017 - 8:29 am PT

Back in May, Alphabet’s Waymo announced that its autonomous vehicles have driven three million miles on public roads since the program’s inception in 2009. Six months later, that total has increased to four million miles.

These millions of miles were driven on public roads, with the Alphabet division noting that the average American driver would take 300 years to complete a similar feat. Meanwhile, for comparison, the previous million took seven months to reach.

During the period since the last milestone, Waymo announced that its self-driving vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona no longer have human safety drivers behind the wheel. With that advancement, a public ride service — utilizing Chrysler Pacifica minivans — is coming soon.

In a blog post, Waymo notes that those four million miles were driven in 23 U.S. cities, which provided environments such as dust storms, hills, and bridges. The majority of that driving being conducted in Central California, followed by Arizona.

Besides real-world driving, Waymo has detailed how it has used a private test track to create 20,000 unique scenarios and virtual simulations to drive 2.5 billion miles last year alone.