Waymo disengagement report

Waymo is doing a lot more testing outside California now. They've done Mountain View so thoroughly they were seeing the same situations over and over. Last year, they were rear-ended twice at the same intersection.

One disengagement every 5000 miles is a problem. It's too infrequent for humans to remain attentive, and too frequent to ignore.

I think the devil's in the details a bit here. For example, for the first 251k miles driven in 2017 (71% of the total) they had 1 disengagement due to a "software discrepancy."

Then over the next 43k miles they had 8 disengagements due to software.

And then none since October.

Looks like a regression bug to me.

Similarly with "perception discrepancies" they had 14 disengagements for the first 175k miles driven (50%) and then 2 over the second half.

Also only 24 of the 63 incidents were "failure detections" where the vehicle immediately handed over control of the vehicle; the rest were handed over "safely" (I assume this means the driver took over control voluntarily.)

Also they don't say what the criteria is, but I suspect given what we've heard about the cars' conservative natures that "disengage for unwanted maneuver of the vehicle" is code for "the car is going too slow / being too passive at an intersection, etc."

So all in all I see positive trends above and beyond the overall numbers. But I'm bullishly biased about self-driving cars, so get out your salt grains.