Autonomous vehicles
Cars and trucks that navigate roads without a human driver, using sensors, maps, and learned perception to plan and act in real traffic.
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An autonomous vehicle uses cameras, radar, and lidar to build a picture of its surroundings, then decides how to steer, brake, and merge — without a human in the loop. The hard part is not any single component but the long tail: the rare scenario no training set covered, the sensor degraded by rain, the pedestrian doing something unexpected. Full autonomy (no fallback driver) has proven far harder than early timelines suggested; most deployed systems still require a human ready to take over.
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Overall = breadth + depth + substance + ½·novelty + freshness (a small boost that halves each week)
One serious crash every eight days
Waymo has now driven 170 million miles with no one behind the wheel, and reports 92% fewer serious-injury crashes than it estimates human drivers would have had over the same roads.
Insuring the autopilot
Lemonade is the first outside insurer to underwrite Tesla's self-driving miles directly, halving the per-mile rate for every mile the car drives itself.
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