“Even the most advanced and largest scale efforts to test automated vehicles today fall woefully short of what is needed to thoroughly test these robotic cars,” said Huei Peng. He is the director of MCity and a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan.

Based on data collected from more than 25 million miles of real-world driving, the process created by the researchers eliminates the majority of miles during real-world driving when nothing special happens and concentrates on those situations that occur only rarely but often lead to serious collisions.