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Comment by alphast0rm | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to consider Google's data from another perspective:

> “Uber logs as many miles in 24 minutes as Google’s autonomous cars have logged in their existence,” they wrote. “While none of these miles are fully autonomous today, we just point out the scale of experience that can accelerate the development of the AI, mapping and learning for autonomous cars.” [1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-12/google-ca...

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> Uber logs as many miles in 24 minutes as Google’s autonomous cars have logged in their existence

Hmm… Let's try comparing 24 minutes of miles logged in Google Maps (and Waze) with Uber's data and see where they stand then…

>It's interesting to consider Google's data from another perspective:

>> “Uber logs as many miles in 24 minutes as Google’s autonomous cars have logged in their existence,”

Google's data is not limited to its autonomous driving project, despite what the cleverly-worded sentence implies. Off the top of my head: Google also has 3D LIDAR data from human-driven StreetView vehicles, GPS and accelerometer data from millions of mobile Waze and GMaps users.

The 24 min quote is strange, they only have 14 Ford Fusions equipped with sensors, so probably not more than Google, so I am not sure they are comparing LIDAR data. It seems this is about smartphone GPS timestamped coordinates of their taxis versus the google LIDAR data, which seems a strange comparison to me. Google also has a billion of unsuspecting people having their smartphone working for them, but the data quality is probably lower than Uber GPS coordinates.

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