Tesla collects a million miles of driving data every ten hours
As previously reported, Tesla owners are also test drivers and amass an unprecedented dataset the company can use to improve the design of its forthcoming self-driving cars. Last week, Sterling Anderson, director of Tesla’s Autopilot program, told MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference that the company has so far recorded data from Tesla drivers who have covered 780m miles in the last 18 months, and the company adds another million miles worth of data every ten hours. This data reflects Elon Musk’s plan to get as many Tesla cars on the road as possible, and stream data back: “When one car learns something, the whole fleet learns. This fleet learning is quite a powerful network effect,” Musk said in a press call last year.

“The ability to pull high-resolution data from these vehicles and to update the vehicles over the air is a significant part of what’s allowed us in 18 months to go from very behind the curve to what is today one of the more advanced autonomous or semi-autonomous driving features,” said Sterling Anderson, director of Tesla’s Autopilot program, at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco on Tuesday (see “No Industry Can Afford to Ignore Artificial Intelligence”).

Tesla began bundling a suite of new sensors into its vehicles in 2014, saying it was for a new emergency braking feature.

Tesla’s Sterling Anderson spoke on Tuesday in San Francisco with MIT Technology Review’s editor in chief, Jason Pontin.

But the 12 ultrasonic sensors positioned around the car sense nearby objects, and the forward-facing cameras and radar units were intended for bigger things. Tesla engineers began using data streaming from cars with those sensors and information on their locations to start testing autonomous driving features.

“Since introducing this hardware 18 months ago we’ve accrued 780 million miles,” said Anderson. “We can use all of that data on our servers to look for how people are using our cars and how we can improve things.” Every 10 hours Tesla gets another million miles worth of data, he said.

Tesla’s engineers initially test new self-driving software against those records. Any that perform well can also be tested by secretly installing them onto customer vehicles and watching how they respond to conditions on the road, although the software doesn't actually control the car.

“We will often install an ‘inert’ feature on all our vehicles worldwide,” said Anderson. “That allows us to watch over tens of millions of miles how a feature performs.”

Anderson’s team can also watch closely when a new feature is activated. For example, he showed a chart illustrating how self-driving Teslas using the Autopilot feature hold themselves much more tightly to the center of the lane than humans do when steering the car. Since its launch last October, Tesla has logged 100 million miles of vehicles steering themselves (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2016: Tesla Autopilot”).

Tesla’s ability to pull data from its cars and even covertly test autonomous driving software is likely unique. Google has demonstrated some of the most advanced self-driving technology, but it can only pull data from its fleet of prototypes, likely smaller and less widely distributed than the collection of Tesla vehicles on the road.