Apple’s secretive automobile undertaking doesn’t have a lot to indicate for its six years of labor, not less than publicly. However information submitted by the corporate to a California company present that Apple went on an autonomous testing jag final 12 months, nearly quadrupling the variety of miles it examined on public roads in comparison with 2022 and leaping 2021’s complete by an element of greater than 30.
The information covers December 2022 to November 2023. The vast majority of the testing miles had been within the second half of the reporting interval, with miles examined peaking in August at 83,900.
Apple has a allow to check autonomous automobile tech on California’s public roads provided that the corporate has a security driver behind the wheel—a primary step that enables autonomous automobile corporations to gather extra information on streets and decide how their software program handles itself in site visitors.
A handful of different corporations, together with Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox, have the state’s permission to check with out security drivers. California permits simply two corporations—Waymo and autonomous supply agency Nuro—to deploy industrial self-driving expertise in California.
Apple’s testing totals are nicely beneath these of extra superior autonomous automobile builders’, although the state’s reporting tips make them troublesome to check instantly. Waymo drove 3.7 million testing miles in California with a security driver behind the wheel and 1.2 million testing miles with nobody behind the wheel. The corporate drove greater than 1.6 million extra miles with passengers within the automobile, in line with separate authorities paperwork. (Waymo can be working a driverless service in Phoenix and is testing in Austin, Texas; its operations in these cities aren’t lined on this information.)
Even Cruise, Common Motors’ troubled autonomous automobile division, which had its allow to deploy in California suspended in October and halted nationwide testing quickly after, drove nearly 2.65 million testing miles within the state in 2023—nearly 2.2 million greater than Apple.
