Comment by ra7
1 day ago
I agree real world data is important for Waymo. I didn't mean to say it wasn't, so I've edited my comment to reflect that. It's just that data is not some magic bullet to achieve self driving like Tesla and others suggest.
Of course, Waymo still has much more room for improvement. But it's much more efficient to supplement less but higher quality IRL data with large amounts of synthetic data, than to run a million data collection vehicles 24x7 because most IRL data is boring and useless.
Waymo said 6 years ago they simulate 20 million miles every single day [1]. Clearly, it's working for them given their scale of deployment right now.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...
Although most of the real-world data is probably boring, collecting more of it likely makes discovering rare edge cases more likely. But since they happen rarely, I imagine that after discovering them, they would then need to figure out how to simulate them.