We’ve taught our cars a collection of advanced driving skills.

In the last few years, we’ve been focusing on the harder tasks of driving — the final 10% — that take much more time and experience to master. Our cars have gotten much better at detecting and responding to everything from crossing guards to emergency vehicles to construction zones. With these advanced driving skills, we can adjust to things like sudden changes in road conditions, such as closed lanes.

The ability to navigate smoothly on the road, while subtle, is also an important advanced driving skill that helps people feel comfortable whether they’re inside or outside of the car. With each mile we drive, our test drivers provide feedback on the car’s movements — things like how quickly we accelerate and brake, the distance we keep from other cars and pedestrians, or the speed and angle we turn. With each piece of feedback, our engineers tweak our software and calibrate our driving behavior, making our self-driving car feel more natural on the road.

Our vehicles can detect flashing lights and sirens of an ambulance, and yield at the intersection, allows emergency vehicles to safely pass.

We have a better understanding of the social side of driving.

Ultimately, being a good driver is about understanding other people — pedestrians, bikers and fellow drivers. Over the last year, we’ve learned that being a good driver is more than just knowing how to safely navigate around people, but also knowing how to interact with them.

In a delicate social dance, people signal their intentions in a number of ways. For example, merging into traffic during rush hour is an exercise in negotiation: I’d like to cut in. May I cut in? If I speed up a little and move into the lane, will you slow down and leave me room, or will you speed up? So much of driving relies on these silent conversations conducted via gentle nudge-and-response. Because we’ve observed or interacted with hundreds of millions of vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists, our software is much better at reliably predicting the trajectory, speed, and intention of other road users. Our cars can often mimic these social behaviors and communicate our intentions to other drivers, while reading many cues that tell us if we’re able to pass, cut in or merge.

We’ve gained experience with rare and unexpected situations.

After 2 million miles of testing, our cars are more prepared to handle rare and unusual situations that human drivers may come across only once in a lifetime. In the last few months, we’ve seen everything from a horseback rider in the middle of the road, to a man wielding a chainsaw in the street (don’t worry, he was trimming trees!), to a couple riding unicycles side-by-side. Today, our cars can confidently handle unusual situations like seeing a car (or three!) driving the wrong way down a road.