At any time, there are now 25000 virtual self-driving cars making their way through fully modeled versions of Austin, Mountain View, and Phoenix, as well as test-track scenarios. Waymo might simulate driving down a particularly tricky road 100Ks of times in 1 day. Collectively, they now drive 13M km per day in the virtual world. In 2016, they logged 4B virtual km versus a little over 5M km by Google’s IRL self-driving cars that run on public roads. And crucially, the virtual km focus on what Waymo people invariably call “interesting” km in which they might learn something new. These are not boring highway commuter km.

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