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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

'Thousands' is very committed. I wonder if they are doing this to make a statement, or if they feel rapidly scaling up to a thousands strong prototype test fleet is the most effective way to accelerate progress towards market ready L4 robotaxis.

As the analogy goes, just because it takes 1 woman 9 months to make a baby does not mean 9 woman working together can make a baby in 1 month.

Either way, it's very committed. GM isn't fucking around, they mean business!

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I think it's in the same vein as Telsa's strategy of autopilot roll-out compared to Google's self-driving pilot program. 1000 self-driving vehicles running for 1 month can collect data at a significantly higher rate than 1 self-driving vehicle running for 1000 months.

It's the quality of the data and what you do with it that really matters. I think the benefits of crowdsourcing driving data to develop autopilot have been overstated. Waymo has pointed out that they are making the lion's share of their progress testing in simulators, where they can play out every conceivable variation of some strange or difficult edge case in a way that is not feasible in the real world.

One thing you can do with 1000s of fleet vehicles is begin untangling the logistics of running a publicly accessible robotaxi network, which will brings with it a whole new set of problems above and beyond the autonomous os itself.

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