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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Gotta rack up those miles, man. They're all on the same stretches of road they've been driving for years, but Google sells that "miles driven" stat hard.

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Obviously you do need to drive in other areas, particularly to get different weather conditions. However, even driving in the same area different incidents are encountered everyday - it is not a waste of training.

Google's cars have:

0 miles in snowstorms

0 miles in historic city centers with small mixed-use (pedestrian, bike and car) streets without lane markings

0 miles in mixed-used residential streets (basically, it's both a footpath and a street, usually with kids playing on it, and also used for cars)

etc.

They mastered only highway driving and driving on perfectly segregated roads.

That's the easy part that VW and Sony's cars had already working in 2008.

i think self driving cars will be a reality, but probably in no less than 50 years.

it's 2016 and we can't even keep websites up without armies of people tending to them 24/7. i don't know what reality everyone who is enthusiastic about this technology is living in.

A lot of "AI"/machine learning/etc. examples show impressive results on relatively narrow and well-controlled use cases. A lot of people look at those and extrapolate to much broader and less controlled environments with lots of messy corner cases and assume it's just a bit more incremental work to get there. Whereas, in fact, getting from essentially a demo to mostly just works in messy real world environments can easily be 90% of the work.

hint: Google hired from CMU's DARPA team

If that is the case, the vehicles might have a better chance at operating under winter conditions, but it likely still won't help them in the streets of Mumbai, Amsterdam, or Rome.

That, and actually increasing the dataset...

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