What’s A Virtual Mile Worth To Self-Driving Safety?

Overlooked in Waymo’s recent claim that the eight millionth mile had been reached by their road-roaming test fleet was a less tangible milestone: the company has now cranked five billion virtual miles through its simulator. In a sector starved for comparison metrics, conventional logic would equate this digital feat to roughly 5,000 lifetimes of human driving.

For another perspective, it’s well over a million times the experience demanded of teenagers before they receive a driver’s license and a two-ton projectile. A reasonable comparison? Difficult to say. But trivial? Not in the least.

Simulators have long been an advantage for racing drivers, a supplement for commercial truckers, and a requirement for airline pilots. It stands to reason, then, that virtual miles driven by AI should count for something.

For starters, the cyberspace built by self-driving firms like Waymo and NVIDIA offers an opportunity to test and retest ad nauseam, in any manner of environment, with all manner of distraction and obstruction; some of these scenarios could take human drivers a lifetime to encounter just once.

Additionally, every terrestrial tribulation encountered by the cars’ sensors can be plugged into these sims, replayed to taste, and eventually disseminated across an entire driving fleet…