Self-driving cars will be safe, we're testing them in a massive AI Sim

The British government this week unveiled plans for an ambitious AI simulator to be used to test self-driving cars. It's part of a stated mission to make the UK the world's leading destination for testing autonomous vehicles. The simulator, called OmniCAV, recreates a virtual version of 32km of Oxfordshire roads. "It's a synthetic digital model of the real world," Mark Stileman, bid manager at one of the partners involved, Ordnance Survey, told us. The OS already knows where a lot things are, and the sim adds "feature classification and retrieval" of road furnitures like gantries and white lines, and crucially, road intersections.