Apple’s secretive car undertaking doesn’t have a lot to point out for its six years of labor, not less than publicly. But data submitted by the corporate to a California company present that Apple went on an autonomous testing jag final 12 months, virtually 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 majority of the testing miles have 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 car tech on California’s public roads provided that the corporate has a security driver behind the wheel—a primary step that permits autonomous car firms to gather extra information on streets and decide how their software program handles itself in visitors.
A handful of different firms, together with Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox, have the state’s permission to check with out security drivers. California permits simply two firms—Waymo and autonomous supply agency Nuro—to deploy business self-driving know-how in California.
Apple’s testing totals are effectively beneath these of extra superior autonomous car builders’, although the state’s reporting tips make them tough to match immediately. 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 firm drove greater than 1.6 million further miles with passengers within the automobile, in accordance 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, General Motors’ troubled autonomous car division, which had its allow to deploy in California suspended in October and halted nationwide testing quickly after, drove virtually 2.65 million testing miles within the state in 2023—virtually 2.2 million greater than Apple.