The California Department of Motor Vehicles on Wednesday released reports detailing how many times in 2019 human safety operators had to take control of self-driving vehicles being tested in the state. According to the reports, robot cars in autonomous mode drove almost 2.9 million miles on public California roads last year, up from 2.1 million miles in 2018.
For a variety of reasons, disengagements are a crummy tool for measuring progress toward safe, efficient autonomy, and for comparing momentum across companies. For one, the players don’t always define “disengagement” in the same way. Plus, lots of the big autonomous vehicle players—Waymo, Uber, Argo AI—do the bulk of their testing outside of California. Companies have more sophisticated internal metrics for measuring their own success—you can read about those here. The reports also do not include driving on private test facilities and campuses, nor the many more “virtual miles” that autonomous vehicle systems travel in digital space.
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