Google self-driving cars cover more than 2 million miles

Google’s self-driving car program has now driven its test vehicles more than 2 million miles, the company said on Wednesday.

The company said that the vehicles had covered the distance, while running in fully autonomous mode, in 16 months. Its fleet, which has grown over time, took six years to drive its first million miles.

{mosads}“What takes a self-driving car from concept, to demonstration, and finally to reality is this accumulated experience,” said Dmitri Dolgov, a top engineer for the company’s self-driving project, in a Medium post. “Even in the early days of our project, it didn’t take long before we could give a good demo ride in our self-driving car.

“But to create a truly self-driving car that can do all the driving, we knew we’d need experience in more challenging and interesting situations.”

Dolgov also said that the vehicles had become better at “reliably predicting the trajectory, speed, and intention of other road users” and dealing with rare incidents, like a horseback rider in the street ahead.

The company’s announcement comes after Uber started testing its own autonomous vehicles on the streets of Pittsburgh. It’s the first test of autonomous cars that includes passengers, who are randomly matched with the cars via the company’s smartphone application.

Google, meanwhile, has taken a more measured approach to testing it’s vehicles. While it currently deploys them in cities around the country — chosen in part because they represent different types of environmental conditions — it only does so with test drivers behind the wheel.