This Toyota self-driving Prius crosses the US from coast to coast… without stopping!

This self-driving Toyota Prius (Level 2) covered almost 5,000 km without making a single stop. A serious act of recklessness on the part of the driver, but also a major milestone for autonomous driving, given the stage this technology is currently at.

Anthony Levandowski is known as the engineer who sparked a long legal battle between Uber and Waymo, and now he is making headlines again… by travelling in a Toyota Prius self-driving from the east coast of the US to the west coast without touching the steering wheel!

Coast-to-coast trip: almost 5,000 km and more than 72 hours

In a post on the website “Medium”, Levandowski claims that his new company “Pronto.AI” (specialised in developing self-driving systems) pulled off the feat in October of this year, covering 3,099 miles (4,987 km) on a journey from San Francisco to New York. The best part is that Levandowski completed the feat without making a single stop… in 3 days!

A recklessness in every sense considering the stage at which self-driving cars currently stand: they only reach Level 3 autonomy, a phase in which the driver must pay attention to the road at all times in order to supervise the car’s movements, which seems unlikely over more than 72 hours of driving.

A Weekend Drive from Pronto.ai on Vimeo.

Although after watching the video one might think the Prius in question should have a Level 4 self-driving system, Levandowski insists that “the car only offers a very advanced Level 2 system, and nothing more than that”.

After completing the trip, Levandowski took the opportunity to criticise the way manufacturers are developing their self-driving systems. According to Anthony, car manufacturers are trying to jump straight to Level 4 autonomy without an intermediate step, something Pronto AI is not doing. The engineers at Anthony’s company have chosen to “build a technology that can learn to drive the way ordinary people do”. In other words, they are not trying to create self-driving cars for a world of full autonomy, but self-driving cars that learn to drive in an environment where automated and manual driving are combined.