Waymo, the autonomous car company owned by Google parent Alphabet, announced a new milestone Monday evening. The company said its fleet of driverless vehicles has driven more than 20 million miles on public roads.

CEO John Krafcik made the announcement in Las Vegas at CES, the world’s largest consumer technology conference.

“You need to have a lot of real world experience,” Krafcik said at a dinner event hosted by Fortune Magazine. “There’s no way to avoid it.”

Waymo, which started in 2009 as a Google project called Chauffeur, took a decade to drive its first 10 million miles, said Krafcik. The company doubled that total in just over a year, he said. The distance would amount to circling the globe 800 times, the company said.
More>>