General Motors’ driverless division Cruise has announced it has completed a million miles without a driver – 15 months after its first fully driverless ride.

In a blog post on the company’s website, Mo Elshenawy, who’s Executive Vice President of Engineering wrote: “Just about every mile we’ve logged has been packed with complex scenarios that have set Cruise up for rapid scale. And all of these miles were collected with our all-electric, renewable-powered fleet offsetting a total of 684 metric tons of CO2 emissions over the course of these million miles.”

He adds that the data team are constantly working to teach the vehicles. “Data from each ride is fed into a continuous learning machine and actively mined to create millions of permutations of on-road scenarios in simulation,” he writes. “Every day, we process five petabytes of simulation data—this means we process more than a 4k digital library of every movie ever made every month. Together, road data and simulated data help us train new AI models that continuously improve upon the performance of older ones.”

He also nods to the challenges faced, such as a recall after a crash and complaints from San Francisco’s Fire Department, writing, “We didn’t arrive at this moment without challenges, obstacles, and public scrutiny — and we’ll certainly see more of that as the next chapter of the AV playbook is written… I’d like to thank all the current and former Cruisers who have helped get us to this moment, and thank every early rider who has jumped at the chance to experience our technology at the start of this revolution in transportation.”

Read the full blog post here.

(Picture – Cruise)