# DrivingBench: Can Vision-Language Models Drive a Toyota Corolla?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38948 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38948/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 24 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14150/) (2023)
- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14337/) (2021)
- [LMDrive: Closed-Loop End-to-End Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07488/) (2023)
- [FrontierMath: A Benchmark for Evaluating Advanced Mathematical Reasoning in AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04872/) (2024)
- [EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09560/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07339/) (2025)
- [DiLu: A Knowledge-Driven Approach to Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16292/) (2023)
- [PIVOT: Iterative Visual Prompting Elicits Actionable Knowledge for VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07872/) (2024)
- [BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13543/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Often Know When They Are Being Evaluated](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23836/) (2025)
- [Me, Myself, and AI: The Situational Awareness Dataset (SAD) for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04694/) (2024)
- [Personalized Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models: Field Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09397/) (2023)
- [LaMPilot: An Open Benchmark Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Language Model Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04372/) (2023)
- [BadRobot: Jailbreaking Embodied LLM Agents in the Physical World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20242/) (2024)
- [LLMs are Greedy Agents: Effects of RL Fine-tuning on Decision-Making Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16078/) (2025)
- [Bench2Drive-VL: Benchmarks for Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01259/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Frontier models excel at many digital benchmarks, yet their ability to drive a real car, an everyday human skill, remains largely untested. We present DrivingBench, to our knowledge the first benchmark where general-purpose vision-language models must drive a real car. Through three tools, the models see camera frames from a Toyota Corolla and directly command its steering and velocity around a parking lot cone course at low speeds. The car may continue moving while the model thinks and new commands replace the currently running one, so inference latency is part of the task, testing the models' abilities to observe, act, monitor, recover, and complete a long-horizon objective under such constraints. We benchmark GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Grok 4.6 in vendor-native harnesses (Codex, Claude Code, Cursor) with up to three attempts each in one conversation; Astra is the only model to finish the course, on its second attempt, with no other attempt passing 50% of the course. Two of the four models improved materially across attempts with retained context. We also detail the design principles behind our action interface, and show how the tool output format and the framing of the task combined to determine whether models would drive at all or refuse. We release our harness, prompts, course map, and traces with video and telemetry for reproducibility.