Google Car Drives Itself for One Million Miles

The 1-million-mile milestone was for modified Lexus RX 450h SUVs equipped with the self-driving technology, but the car pictured here — built entirely by google — is more fun to look at. (Image: Google)

Google’s self-driving car has driven itself one million miles. Google announced the milestone June 4 on Google Plus. “Our software has now self-driven the equivalent of 75 years of typical U.S. adult driving! Along the way, we’ve navigated more than 200,000 stop signs, 600,000 traffic lights, and seen 180 million vehicles — with several thousand traffic cones, some fluttering plastic shopping bags, and a rogue duck thrown in for good measure.”

In May, Google announced that the car had driven 1.7 million miles, but that number was for both autonomous and manual driving, The one-million-mile milestone the car just reached is for autonomous driving only.

“We’ve come a long way since +Larry Page [Google president and CEO] first challenged us to demonstrate that self-driving technology had long-term potential. Back in 2009, he gave us two audacious goals. The first was to drive 100,000 miles on public roads; in 2009, this was about 10x more miles than had ever been completed by any autonomous driving team. The second was to drive 10 sets of 100 interesting miles — well-known California routes that included crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, navigating the curves of Lombard Street in San Francisco, and traversing the 200+ traffic lights of major boulevard El Camino Real.

“We met those early goals, but it was hard to imagine we’d ever cruise the boulevards of Mountain View, Calif., as smoothly as we do today. We’re taking this million mile milestone as further proof that fully self-driving vehicles will become a reality, and we’re looking forward to finding out where the next million miles will take us.”