Apparently developers have worked out that there are not enough hours in a day to clock the real world miles needed to teach cars how to drive themselves, so they drafted in Grand Theft Auto V.

Last year, scientists from Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany and Intel Labs developed a way to pull visual information from Grand Theft Auto V. Now researchers are deriving algorithms from GTAV software that is being tweaked for use in the burgeoning self-driving sector.

Rockstar Games’ latest offering is just as good as reality, with 262 types of vehicles, more than 1,000 different unpredictable pedestrians and animals, 14 weather conditions and countless bridges, traffic signals, tunnels and intersections. Not to mention people shooting at you for no apparent reason.

Alain Kornhauser, a Princeton University professor of operations research and financial engineering who advises the Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering team said that the fictional city of Los Santos will never be a substitute for bona fide asphalt. But the game "is the richest virtual environment that we could extract data from”.

Waymo uses its simulators to create a confounding motoring situation for every variation engineers can think of: having three cars changing lanes at the same time at an assortment of speeds and directions, for instance.

What's learned virtually is applied physically, and problems encountered on the road are studied in simulation.