The Numbers Don’t Lie: Self-Driving Cars Are Getting Good
It’s report card time for the automakers and Silicon Valley denizens studying the tricky problem of making cars drive themselves, and everyone is passing.
The California DMV just released its annual slate of “disengagement reports,” documents provided by the 11 companies that received state permits to test autonomous vehicles by the end of 2015. The results, summarized below, reveal how often humans had to wrest control away from the computer, and why (sort of).
Although the reports are an imperfect measure of how the technology performs, they do reveal rapid progress toward the day when you are no longer needed behind the wheel. Google and General Motors are leading the class with cars capable of driving hundreds of miles at a stretch without trouble. But even those who don’t make the honor roll show impressive gains. Nissan’s robocars, for example, needed human intervention once every 247 miles, compared to once every 14 miles in 2015.
