Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving company, has logged 20 million miles on public roads, the company announced in a Tuesday press statement. The new milestone comes just 15 months after Waymo hit the 10 million mile mark in October 2018.
The latest figure puts Waymo far, far ahead of its rivals. I noted 15 months ago that only one company had announced even 1 million miles of driving—and that was Uber, which was forced to scale back its testing after a fatal crash. Today, the story is largely the same; if anyone else in the self-driving industry has cracked a million miles of on-road driving, I haven’t seen the press release. (Update: Russian company Yandex and Chinese company Baidu both reached 1 million miles last year.)
Back in 2018, I reported that most of Waymo’s rivals are quick to dismiss the significance of testing miles. Today (as in 2018), they argue that quality of testing miles matters more than quantity.
Back then I wasn’t entirely convinced. As I pointed out at the time, there’s no substitute for real-world testing when you’re shipping a safety-critical product. And Waymo was aiming to launch a fully driverless service by the end of 2018. So I thought it made sense that Waymo would be logging millions of miles to work out the last few kinks. The fact that rivals weren’t logging as many miles, I thought, was just another sign that they were further from commercial launch.
But Waymo wasn’t actually on the verge of launching a driverless commercial product in late 2018. The company missed its self-imposed deadline, and more than a year later, Waymo still isn’t offering driverless rides to the general public.
The company has been making slow and steady progress. Waymo says it has completed some fully driverless rides for passengers in its closed testing program in a portion of the Phoenix area. But it’s not clear how soon this fully driverless technology will become available commercially in Phoenix. And it’s even less clear how quickly Waymo will be able to scale up to other cities and eventually the world.
What if Waymo’s approach is a dead end?
There are two possibilities. One is that Waymo is fundamentally on the right track but that the development and testing process is just taking longer than Waymo executives expected a couple of years ago. In this scenario, Waymo will eventually launch a fully driverless service and then quickly scale it up to more cities. Then Waymo’s rivals may regret having underinvested in their own testing and scramble to catch up.