Waymore miles
Cruise's difficulties are undoubtedly a setback for the industry — and Cruise’s owner General Motors — but it's important to get some perspective on all of the progress that has been made. According to reports filed with California’s DMV, autonomous vehicles racked up nearly 5.7 million miles of driving last year. The vast majority, 5.1 million or so, were done with a safety driver present, in case of the need to intervene. Cruise managed the second most miles, but it was Waymo, the self-driving arm of Google (Alphabet), that reported the most mileage in its report: an astonishing ~2.9 million miles.
For context on just how far that is, it’s roughly equivalent to driving from LA to New York and back again, more than 500 times. Other leaders in the industry that racked up significant mileage included Zoox, Pony.ai and Apple — the latter of which continues to work on AV technology in its typically secretive fashion.
Tesla is the other major player in self-driving technology in the US, but the company defines its FSD (Full Self-Driving) beta as a “driver-assisted” technology, rather than a full autonomous vehicle, allowing it to skip the official reporting of any testing to the state of California. But, Tesla’s own reports suggest that more than half a billion (with a b) miles have now been covered by Tesla’s FSDbeta.
