Self-driving car testing goes all virtual, just like everything else

Waymo, the self-driving car company spun off from Google, shut down its robo-taxi service in Arizona and stopped testing its vehicles on public roads because of the coronavirus pandemic. But that doesn’t mean driverless car testing isn’t still happening. 

Just like most things since the outbreak, autonomous testing has gone virtual. Waymo has its engineers working from home putting a digital version of Waymo vehicles through rigorous simulation testing. Its IRL testing was paused in March when social distancing efforts started around the U.S. Other autonomous car companies like Cruise, Zoox, and Aurora also have suspended its road testing in the Bay Area, the Phoenix area, and Las Vegas, among other test sites. Even these driverless test systems involve a lot of vulnerable humans to make everything work. 

Even if the roads are quiet, behind the scenes Waymo is driving about 20 million miles each day. That’s the power of simulation, which emulates real-world situations in a virtual world. That means one day of simulated driving matches more than 100 years of IRL autonomous driving. Years. It’s no small feat to run these virtual worlds, and it takes tons of computing power to run simulations 24/7.

All together, Waymo’s accumulated 15 billion simulated miles. On actual roads, Waymo’s racked up a mere 20 million miles. Waymo and Cruise have the most miles logged out of all the self-driving companies. But Waymo uses those experiences from the real world to program in edge cases during simulation, like unprotected left turns, or bicyclists and pedestrians crossing suddenly. Even in simulation, Waymo takes IRL feedback about rider comfort to test how braking or accelerating affect riders’ perception.

So just like all of us moving our social and work lives to the digital realm (Zoom happy hour, anyone?), self-driving cars are still driving from (engineers’) homes.