Self-driving cars roaming the public roads of California behaved themselves remarkably well last year, according to the state's annual autonomous car disengagement report.
Released this week, the report includes submissions from all companies holding permits to test self-driving cars on public roads. They're required to record the number of times their cars' autonomous mode disengaged, the location and cause of each disengagement, and how long it took for the driver to assume manual control of the vehicle in each case.
Google's self-driving cars, which were recently transferred to Waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, were among the most improved. Waymo's vehicles travelled 635,868 miles in autonomous mode during the reporting period, and only experienced 124 disengagements. That compares to 341 disengagements in 424,331 testing miles during the previous period.
"This four-fold improvement reflects the significant work we've been doing to make our software and hardware more capable and mature," Waymo self-driving head Dmitri Dolgov wrote in a Medium post. He noted that most of the testing miles were on urban or suburban streets, which are more challenging environments than highways for both human and autonomous drivers.
Still, the most frequent category of disengagement for Waymo was software discrepancies, which suggests there are still kinks to work out, although the company notes that all of the disengagements occurred "during planned tests." Nearly all of them occurred on streets, with only 12 on highways, and none on freeways or interstates.
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Waymo is by far the most prolific tester of self-driving cars in California (GM comes in second with just under 10,000 miles logged), but each company has different testing priorities, so the disengagement reports can't necessarily be compared on equal footing. For instance, in contrast to Waymo's results, Ford logged all of its 590 autonomous testing miles on highways and recorded just three disengagements.
Automotive technology company Bosch reported the most disengagements, at 1,442, all of which were the result of a "planned test of technology."
Tesla, which has received government scrutiny following the deadly crash of one of its cars while operating in Autonomous Mode, reported 550 miles of testing and just under 200 disengagements.