As it stands it is a rule in which all companies that wish to test self-driving cars are required to have a human driver behind the wheel. This is a safety net of sorts where in the event something goes wrong, the human driver can easily takeover control of the car and hopefully steer it to safety.
Now it seems that based on the statistics submitted by Alphabet’s Waymo to the California DMV, it looks like the company has the lowest human driver takeover rates (via 9to5Google) compared to the competition. Waymo also notes that the disengagements are not safety related, and that this is merely the transitioning in and out of autonomous mode.
Based on the numbers that were submitted, Waymo is reporting that from December 2016 to November 2017, there have been a total of 63 disengagements over 352,544.6 miles traveled, where for the most part the number of disengagements were in the single digits save for December 2016 and April 2017.
My quick tally on “disengagements” (humans taking over to avoid accidents) per 1,000 miles by self-driving car prototypes in California. pic.twitter.com/2TVItyk4r9
— Amir Efrati (@amir) January 31, 2018
The Information’s Amir Efrati also compiled a list of the competition and confirmed that Waymo’s disengagement is indeed the lowest at 0.18 disengagements per 1,000 miles in California. Coming in second is GM-back Cruise at 0.8, and after which it seems that the rest of the competition are facing relatively high rates ranging from 4.8 all the way up to 774.6.
Filed in . Read more about Self-Driving Cars and Waymo.