Apple’s secret car undertaking would not have a lot to indicate for it, no less than publicly, after six years of labor. However knowledge the corporate filed with a California company reveals that Apple accomplished an autonomous check drive final 12 months, almost quadrupling the variety of miles it examined on public roads in comparison with 2022 and rising the 2021 whole by an element of has elevated from greater than 30.
The information covers the interval December 2022 to November 2023. The vast majority of check kilometers came about within the second half of the reporting interval, with a peak in August of 83,900 examined kilometers.
Apple is just licensed to check autonomous car know-how on public roads in California if the corporate has a security driver behind the wheel — a primary step that can permit autonomous car corporations to gather extra knowledge on the streets and decide how their software program behaves in visitors.
A handful of different corporations, together with Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox, have state permission to check with out security drivers. California permits solely two corporations — Waymo and autonomous supply firm Nuro — to deploy industrial self-driving know-how in California.
Apple’s check totals are nicely beneath these of extra superior autonomous car builders, though state reporting pointers make it troublesome to match them instantly. Waymo drove 3.7 million check miles in California with a security driver behind the wheel and 1.2 million check miles with out anybody behind the wheel. In response to separate authorities paperwork, the corporate drove greater than 2.6 million further kilometers with passengers within the automotive. (Waymo additionally operates a driverless service in Phoenix and is testing in Austin, Texas; operations in these cities usually are not coated on this knowledge.)
Even Cruise, Common Motors’ troubled autonomous car division, which had its license to function in California suspended in October and halted nationwide testing quickly after, drove almost 2.65 million check miles within the state in 2023 — almost 2, 2 million greater than Apple.