10-10-2016 -- On a foggy Monday morning in Silicon Valley this week, I took a ride in Google’s self-driving car and nothing happened.
That’s a big deal.
That’s because the company announced its self-driving car project, which was created in 2009, has racked up over two million miles of driving experience. It’s a significant marker for Google — no other company has that many miles of fully self-driving experience.
But that landmark actually doesn’t mean much on its own, because the real milestone is how well the technology has developed in that time.
“It’s a nice round number, but it’s really about the quality of those miles,” said Google’s head of self-driving tech Dmitri Dolgov. “We’re building a driver,” he later added.
Indeed, because after riding in Google’s car, it was clear that two million miles in four cities, along with the millions of miles a day the company does in simulated rides, has helped the technology develop from what is basically a nervous teen student driver to the equivalent of a more experienced licensed person who drives every day.
Mistakes are still made and collisions happen — Google has been involved in 14 real ones so far, 13 of which were caused by other drivers — but the ride we took in its self-driving car was uneventful, which is the goal the company has long been aiming for consistently.
My ride started like your basic self-driving car test drive. A Lexus equipped with Google’s proprietary sensors and cameras pulled up to the front of its Mountain View headquarters building, with Dolgov in the driver’s seat. Another engineer sat in the passenger seat manning a laptop that was running the self-driving software.
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