Self-driving cars are being trained in virtual worlds while the real one is in chaos

Brandon Moak felt as if a freight train had hit him.

It was mid-March, and the cofounder and CTO of the autonomous- trucking startup Embark Trucks had been keeping tabs on the emergence of covid-19. As a shelter-in-place order went into effect throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, where Embark is based, Moak and his team were forced to ground almost all their 13 self-driving semi-trucks (a few stayed on the road moving essential freight but weren’t in autonomous mode) and send home the majority of their workforce, with no idea how long it’d be before they could return.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/22/1002129/data-save-autonomous-vehicles-coronavirus/