
California DMV autonomous vehicle reports for 2016 - Animats
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disengagement_report_2016
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Animats
The California DMV's required autonomous vehicle disengagement reports are now
online. A disengagement is when the human driver had to take over. These
provide one of the few neutral assessments of how autonomous vehicle
development is progressing.

\- Google/Alphabet/Waymo: disengagements per mile down 75% this year over last
year. 124 disengagements over 600,000 miles driven. Zero on interstates and
freeways.

\- Cruise/GM: 9768 miles, 231 disengagements. (Dec 2015 to Nov 2016).

\- Tesla: 185 disengagements over 550 miles (not thousands) driven. Almost all
the driving was in one month. Most driving was on suburban roads.

\- BMW: 638 miles, 1 disengagement, on a freeway, blamed on poor lane
markings.

There are other reports (Delphi, VW, Ford, etc.) but the number of miles
driven isn't large and the number of disconnects is high, so they're still in
the early stages of R&D. Honda is testing on a test track in Contra Costa
County, probably the old Naval Weapons Station. Uber didn't file; they refuse
to test in California because they'd have to report like everybody else.

So that's the real state of autonomous driving right now. Google is nearing
production level quality, and is probably ready for freeway driving. Cruise is
starting to log the miles, but is doing three orders of magnitude worse on
disconnects than Google. Tesla is doing even worse. Everybody else is just
getting started.

~~~
jayjay71
This is great data. I'm curious what will happen with all of the talent that
recently left Google, including various startups for self-driving cars. That
said, Google is doing better than I thought. Kudos to them.

Any idea how to benchmark this against humans quantitatively? Also, any idea
how trivial or significant a disengagement is?

Google's "perfect" record on freeways lends credence to my theory that trucks
are just a few years away from being fully automated. I actually suspect the
laws will trail the technology there.

