Tesla won't be able to advertise its cars as Full Self-Driving starting next year under a new California law. Senate Bill 1398 was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsome and it targets the electric automaker's marketing of software features in some models that imply the cars can fully drive themselves - which they cannot. Elon Musk's company lobbied against the bill, arguing that it already makes customers aware of the technology's limitations. Tesla owners in the U.S. must pay extra $15,000 for full self-driving software and were required to have a safety score of at least 80. However, Musk recently announced that anyone in North America can now request the FSD software. Tesla won't be able to advertise its cars as Full Self-Driving starting next year under a new California law Drivers are also told that regardless of the software's capabilities, they should always pay attention to the road and be prepared to take the wheel at any moment.

Tesla's Full Self Driving Beta has traveled 35 million miles - collecting a gigantic amount of data that will further improve its capabilities - with most of those miles having been driven in the past seven months. 'We have now deployed our FSD Beta with City Streets driving capability to over 100,000 owners - they're very happy with the capability of the system and we'll continue to improve it every week,' CEO Elon Musk said during Tesla's earnings call this week. 'We've now driven over 35 million miles with FSD Beta.' Tesla plans to continue expanding FSD Beta to more owners in the coming months. 'That's more autonomous miles than any company we're aware of, I think probably more than -- it might be more than any -- all other companies combined. So -- and that mileage is growing exponentially.' Alphabet's Waymo, in contrast, revealed in August 2021 that its autonomous vehicles had driven 20 million miles since 2009 - a 12 year time frame.

COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the world, affecting people's lives and forcing many businesses to suspend their operations. At Waymo, we're actively monitoring the situation, taking steps to support our local communities, and contributing to COVID-19 response efforts. While Waymo has temporarily suspended its on-the-road operations as we put the health and safety of our riders, partners, and employees first, we are still driving our technology forward with our work in simulation. Gaining 100 years of experience in one day Simulation is vital in the advancement of self-driving technology. At Waymo, one day in simulation is like driving more than 100 years in the real world.

A year ago, Lyft submitted a report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles that summed up its 2018 autonomous vehicle testing activity in a single, short paragraph. "Lyft Inc. did not operate any vehicles in autonomous mode on California public roads during the reporting period," the letter read. "As such, Lyft Inc. has no autonomous mode disengagements to report." The 2019 data tells a different story. Lyft had 19 autonomous vehicles testing on public roads in California in 2019, according to data released earlier this week by the CA DMV.

Heavy rain and blizzards aren't the only forms of severe weather Waymo's self-driving vehicles encounter on the regular. In a blog post published this morning, the Alphabet subsidiary laid out the ways its cars in over 25 cities tackle fog, dust, smoke, and other dangerous conditions that trip up even human drivers. "Challenging [environmental] conditions, which affect human driver and vehicle performance, are one of the leading contributors to crashes on our roads … Poor perception creates significant risk for other road users including pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicle occupants," wrote Waymo chief safety officer Debbie Hersman. "Waymo is working hard to master a variety of weather scenarios as part of our mission to improve road safety." To this end, Waymo says its autonomous vehicles are designed to detect sudden extreme weather changes, such as a snowstorm, that could impact their ability to drive safely.

Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary that hopes to someday pepper roads with self-driving taxis, today pulled back the curtains on a portion of the data used to train the algorithms underpinning its cars: The Waymo Open Dataset. Waymo principal scientist Dragomir Anguelov claims it's the largest multimodal sensor sample corpus for autonomous driving released to date. "[W]e are inviting the research community to join us with the [debut] of the Waymo Open Dataset, [which is composed] of high-resolution sensor data collected by Waymo self-driving vehicles," wrote Anguelov in a blog post published this morning. "Data is a critical ingredient for machine learning … [and] this rich and diverse set of real-world experiences has helped our engineers and researchers develop Waymo's self-driving technology and innovative models and algorithms." The Waymo Open Dataset contains data collected over the course of the millions of miles Waymo's cars have driven in Phoenix, Kirkland, Mountain View, and San Francisco, and it covers a wide variety of urban and suburban environments during day and night, dawn and dusk, and sunshine and rain.

Self-driving cars promise to change cities, mint billionaires, and push robots into the everyday lives of millions of people. The only problem is, no one knows quite when or how. And with all the research and development locked up inside private companies, the public has little information to judge the progress of the technology, aside from the occasional PR reveal or disaster. We have one (imperfect) yardstick, however: the numbers that the California Department of Motor Vehicles requires that any company testing an autonomous vehicle in the state file every month. Those are rolled up and released in January of each year.

One would expect that the vast majority of Waymo's autonomous miles will come in Phoenix in 2018, where the company is launching a commercial pilot of its self-driving taxi service. Soon, however, Waymo will be expanding that trial to more cities. Chrysler recently reported that they are set to deliver "thousands" of the customized minivans that Waymo uses over the next year "to support Waymo as it expands its service to more cities across the United States." All this to say: Waymo's been at it the longest and is certainly furthest along in developing a real autonomous service. The only company that's even in the same order of magnitude, in terms of miles driven in California, is Cruise, which was acquired by GM.