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I don't understand how reports like these make sense. A mile driven by a Waymo/Cruise car on route/conditions carefully chosen to test an update, or gather data on a new type of route/conditions is way more valuable than another mile driven on the same freeway stretch/conditions that already works perfectly. Just totaling up the number of miles driven seems to be the vanity metric of the Self-Driving Car industry.

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It's the same thing Apple did with the app store. They touted the number of apps they hosted, even though tons of them were things like a trip guide per every city on the planet. Not a useful metric, but then every other app store used the metric and then it became a competition about who had the most apps.

This is what happens when people enter a new market: They look for metrics, any metrics, and then optimize on those (because that is how business usually makes money in well understood fields) even if they are not really representative.

Pretty much every business will use different numbers in marketing themselves than they should be using to measure the health of their business. The purpose of marketing numbers is different, because they have to sound impressive to a broad audience rather than the most critical thinkers within that audience.

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