Peru’s crazy drivers offer a data deluge for self-driving cars

One startup sees opportunity in the chaos. “It’s a hidden goldmine of data,” says Arturo Deza of Artificio Inc, which is creating a dataset from Peru’s shoddy roads to train self-driving cars. Many tech firms train autonomous cars in Europe and the United States. But conditions there “are too clean and pristine”, says Mr Deza, a former researcher at MIT and Harvard University. Such cars still struggle to identify traffic cones, and would fare hopelessly amid roving livestock. Artificio plans to collect 10m hours of driving data from Peru and other Latin American countries by getting transport companies to install cameras on their fleets of vehicles. It would then license its dataset to tech firms.