The stat excludes accidental disengagements, end-of-route disengagements and early takeovers.
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Other startups making progress include Zoox (0.50 disengagements per 1,000 miles), Nuro (0.97 disengagements per 1,000 miles), and Pony.
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And he includes a graph that he says shows Cruise's improving rates of disengagements, or the distance traveled between disengagements.
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It's also a modest improvement over 2015, when Mercedes reported 1,057 disengagements over 1,739 miles, a rate of 143 disengagements per 1,000 miles.
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In 2015, the number of disengagements was around 0.8 times per thousand miles in California, and currently, Waymo's only seeing around 0.2 disengagements per thousand miles travelled.
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Apple noted that it initially separated disengagements into two categories: manual takeovers and software disengagements, and it had 40,198 of the former and 36,359 of the latter through June 2018.
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Still, the company wants to cut down on disengagements through its new "Explorer" tool, which allows the company's community of users to crowdsource disengagements and fix them in future versions of the software.
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The company reported 21 disengagements, or one every 2000,20.98 miles.
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I am not to press it unless other disengagements fail.
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More fundamentally, disengagements are a poor way to measure progress.
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Starting in July, though, it completely changed how it reported disengagements.
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It's measured in disengagements per 20173,000 miles or miles per disengagement.
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Between the seven companies that filed, there were 0003,894 disengagements logged.
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First off, the companies use different jargon to explain various disengagements.
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Of those 28 disengagements, nine were attributed to the autonomous system's failing.
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Disengagements also often rise and fall along with the scale of testing.
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But its drop in disengagements suggests the Alphabet unit is improving its system.
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Too few disengagements indicate a lack of instructive situations from which to learn.
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And in 2015, Tesla reported 0 miles and 0 disengagements to California's DMV.
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Still, California requires companies obtain a permit and submit annual reports on software disengagements.
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For Waymo, one of these so-called disengagements happened, on average, every 5,127 miles.
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Cruise vehicles drove about a third less, at 127,516 miles, and had 105 disengagements.
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Our collective fixation on disengagements has been further fueled by the AV companies themselves.
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By the letter of California's law, no "manual" driver means no disengagements to report.
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Disengagements are not a scientific measure of the complexity and operating characteristics of these vehicles.
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Of course, disengagements are moot for a vehicle without a human in the driver's seat.
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In 20173, Waymo drove 22017 million miles in California, with 22019 disengagements every 22020,000 miles.
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Its rate of disengagements per 258,266 miles was 222, which is similar to last year.
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Similarly, if a company is focused on highway driving, it should inherently have far fewer disengagements.
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This ambiguity around disengagements has led many experts to dismiss the California reports as completely meaningless.
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Disengagements are best seen not as failures but as learning experiences that help AV systems improve.
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Waymo also reported that it had a paltry number of disengagements, 2007, for the entire year.
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It recorded a total of 68 disengagements — 43 of which were in the first six months.
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Waymo, for example, drove 352,1.33 miles in the state during the period with only 63 disengagements.
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Waymo also reported that it had a paltry number of disengagements, 2244, for the entire year.
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The company says it drove 214,133 miles in autonomous mode in 213 and logged 212 disengagements.
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The numbers also don't make any recognition of improvements Google has made to its self-driving technology: the highest number of disengagements(48) occurred in January 2015, when Google's cars drove 18,000 miles; in October, when the cars drove 47,000 miles, only 11 disengagements took place.
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"As of June, our system can complete the route end-to-end with no disengagements," Rodrigues wrote.
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The report isn't too detailed so it's hard to discern what the causes of those disengagements were.
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Data provided to California showed Waymo had 0003,219 miles between disengagements, compared with 11,017 miles in 2018.
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Sneaking into third place is Apple, which reported 79,745 miles and 6,951 disengagements, or about 1.15 miles per disengagement.
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Overall, seven companies filed a report covering "disengagements" in the 15-month period between September 2014 and November 2015.
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But in 214, its ratio was 2945 disengagements per 173,217 miles — over a larger range of nearly 21,2000 miles.
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Coming in second is General Motors' Cruise, with about half a million miles and 0.19 disengagements per 1,000 miles.
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Waymo, for instance, told TechCrunch that its disengagements will likely increase as it scales up its testing in California.
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Disengagements are instances when a driver takes manual control of a test vehicle in autonomous mode to correct its trajectory.
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Users upload data from their drives to Explorer and then select from a list of canned reasons for the disengagements.
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That's a rate of 6.8 disengagements per 1,000 miles — an improvement from its 2015 rate of 71 per 1,000 miles.
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Increasing Margins: Fitch expects Jabil's diversified manufacturing segment (DMS) to outgrow its EMS (assuming no material disengagements) over the intermediate term.
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Waymo led the industry with 11,017 miles between disengagements in 2018, a 50 percent improvement from 5,595 miles the year before.
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Of those disengagements, drivers manually took back control of the system 183 times and the system returned control automatically 153 times.
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In 2015, Volkswagen's two cars drove 14,945 miles and disengaged 260 times, for a rate of 17 disengagements per 1,000 miles.
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For various reasons, disengagements are a crummy tool for measuring progress toward safe, efficient autonomy, and for comparing momentum across companies.
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Waymo's total number of disengagements per 1,000 miles of driving went from 0.8 in 2015 to 0.2 in 2016 — a precipitous drop.
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That involved frequent disengagements from the safety driver, which made Cruise's demo seem miles ahead in terms of technological maturity by comparison.
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Overall, the company reported 80,739 miles driven and 76,23 disengagements during a reporting period that stretched from April 2017 through November 2018.
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Increasing Margins, FCF: Fitch expects Jabil's diversified manufacturing segment (DMS) to outgrow its EMS (assuming no material disengagements) over the intermediate term.
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Waymo had the fewest number of disengagements — based on a per mile basis — of all the companies testing cars on California roads.
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While those cautious disengagements could be frustrating at times, Super Cruise proved a trusty co-pilot that prevents overconfidence from either party.
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Eighty-nine percent of disengagements occurred on city streets, where more obstacles and stop-and-go traffic make autonomous driving more difficult.
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The metrics: Disengagements: Absent contextual details, the number of times an operator takes control of the vehicle is a poor indicator of performance.
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All of its disengagements occurred between June and November, indicating that its cars drove very little in the first half of the year.
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The other is disengagements — moments when a human driver has to take over because the computer couldn't handle a situation — per mile driven.
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"The idea that disengagements give a meaningful signal about whether an [autonomous vehicle] is ready for commercial deployment is a myth," he writes.
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The company register 0.80 disengagements (again, just times the self-driving software was turned off, not actual accidents) in 2015, versus only 0.20 in 2016.
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Google's rate of disengagements is also far lower than those reported by other companies testing autonomous technology in California, including Nissan, VW, and Mercedes-Benz.
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Following its new methodology from July 2018 forward, Apple reported 28 "important disengagements" over 56,135 miles, a rate of one per every 2,005 miles driven.
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Embark's truck has just arrive back on the West Coast, and the team is still pulling all the data regarding disengagements and human intervention, but according to subjective reports from the drivers on board "the vast majority of the driving was autonomous," with "hours at a time with no disengagements, and when they did occur they were usually only a few seconds" long, per Rodrigues.
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The report published Wednesday lists the number of times a driver had to take over for the autonomous system while driving — these are known as disengagements.
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Similarly (if more charitably), Zoox blames many of its disengagements on its system's failure to accurately predict where cyclists, pedestrians, scooters, and other vehicles are headed.
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Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, said it kept the threshold for measuring disengagements low to gather as much data as possible to refine the technology.
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Driverless testing permit holders must also report any collisions involving a driverless test vehicle to the DMV within 10 days and submit an annual report of disengagements.
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California requires self-driving operators to report the number of disengagements, or the frequency at which human drivers were forced to take control of their driverless vehicles.
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The company's reported around a 1400% improvement in performance, with the number of average miles between disengagements climbing from around 300 miles between each to aver 4,5553.
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The reports track how many miles a vehicle travels between "disengagements" – that is, when the human operator took control away from the automated system piloting the vehicle.
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The other issue is that disengagements don't provide an "apples to apples" comparison of technology, as these test vehicles operate in a variety of environments and conditions.
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And it's worth noting Google's cars have never been at-fault in a crash, and Google's data shows a significant drop in "driver disengagements" over the past year.
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This is known as a "disengagement", and the number of disengagements per 1,23 miles travelled provides a crude measure of how the companies developing AVs compare (see chart).
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While increasing miles traveled by 50 percent, it said the number of self-driving disengagements fell by 13 percent to 124, an average of one every 5,000 miles.
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Perhaps most damning is that the best way to limit disengagements—racking up miles in easy, well-studied areas—is a bad way to improve an autonomous system.
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Most of these disengagements are not accidents, but they often represent times when a driver would have had to shut the system down to make some kind of fix.
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Rather than minimizing disengagements (because they are publicly reported), teams should monitor them to ensure their technology is being sufficiently challenged and learning the right lessons along the way.
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But Otto hasn't signed up for California's autonomous testing program, which requires companies to purchase a $150 permit and file annual reports about the number miles driven and disengagements.
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Our objective is not to minimize disengagements; rather, it is to gather, while operating safely, as much data as possible to enable us to improve our self-driving system.
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Waymo tweeted that the metric, called disengagements, is not an accurate or relevant way to measure a company's technical progress, even though it is widely used to do that.
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Declining to do that likely means Uber doesn't have to publicly report things like crashes and "disengagements"—when the human operator takes control to make sure the car operates safely.
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California's Department of Motor Vehicles releases an annual report detailing the number of disengagements reported by companies it has licensed to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in the state.
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While testing in autonomous mode, the company says it experienced 142 disengagements, a quarter of which were caused by "a single software issue" that was addressed earlier in the year.
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Waymo's self-driving software had far fewer disengagements in 2016 than it did in 2015 in the state of California, despite a big increase in the number of miles driven overall.
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"Disengagements in these cases are actually a good thing because they are the equivalent to discovering and solving an issue with our car's capability," the team wrote about the latest numbers.
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While Uber has yet to publicly report its self-driving miles and disengagements, all the other companies operating in California have had to submit their reports for the last two years.
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The news appears to put to rest a rumor that was floated on Reddit back in January that Tesla had pulled off the drive, but with around 30 "disengagements," or human interventions.
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The California Department of Motor Vehicles released its annual cache of autonomous vehicle testing and disengagements data that, depending how one chooses to interpret the data, shows either stunning progress or stagnation.
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California currently requires the industry to hand over data on vehicle disengagements and collisions, and the National Association of City Transportation Officials has called for the federal government to adopt similar requirements.
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California's annual reports are closely watched in the self-driving world, mainly for the sheer number of companies that test there and the state's rules that require disclosure of miles driven, disengagements, and accidents.
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GM's Cruise tested a fleet of electric vehicles, including 20 Chevrolet Bolts, equipped with self-driving systems, noting the number of disengagements fell as miles traveled increased in the latter half of the year.
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" Google points out, though, that the company's objective is not necessarily to minimize the number of disengagements, but to "gather as much data as possible to enable us to improve our self-driving system.
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All told, safety operators across California took control from their robots about 9,000 times, but a few companies accounted for most of those: Lyft, Mercedes-Benz, and Toyota each reported more than 1,600 disengagements.
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The companies also follow different protocols: Some tell their drivers to take control in school zones or when emergency vehicles are nearby, generating disengagements in spots where the vehicle might have done just fine.
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A Waymo spokesperson said that disengagements are a part of the testing process, as the company rolls out new vehicles (its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivan made its debut last year) and tests new skills.
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Last week, new data from the California Department of Motor Vehicles showed Apple's self-driving cars ranked the worst in disengagements, or instances when a human driver needs to take over from the automated system.
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Of the few states that have autonomous-vehicle laws, California is the only one that requires companies to publicly report crashes and "disengagements," the moments when a human intervenes out of a concern for safety.
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Almost half of those disengagements — 51 — were because of a "software discrepancy," which can mean a lot of things but generally that the brain of the car isn't doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
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But among companies that did any testing on public roads, Tesla reported the lowest number of miles — 550, or more than 4403 percent fewer than Waymo reported — and a relatively high number of disengagements, 182.
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The companies wouldn't say how many disengagements, when the vehicle forces the human driver to take the wheel, they've recorded over the course of the operation so far, nor would they disclose the total miles driven.
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Through these tests, the company calculated that 7383 of these 69 manual disengagements would have resulted in contact of some sort with another road-user or (in two of the 13 cases) with a traffic cone.
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A company that chooses to test a large number of miles driven in urban centers, surrounded by traffic and pedestrians, likely will report more frequent disengagements than one that chooses to focus its testing on freeways.
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GM's Cruise tested a fleet of electric vehicles, including 20 Bolts and five Nissan Leafs, equipped with self-driving systems, noting the number of disengagements fell as miles traveled increased in the latter half of the year.
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Data released last week by California showed Waymo and Cruise had the greatest number of test miles between "disengagements," when a human driver must intervene to take control from a self-driving system during testing on public roads.
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They argue the technology is not ready for prime time, and they want Congress to empower regulators at NHTSA to require more data from autonomous vehicle operators, such as crash reporting and disengagements of the self-driving software.
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It also requires companies to report "disengagements," a term that describes each time a self-driving vehicle disengages out of autonomous mode either because its technology failed or a human safety driver took manual control for safety reasons.
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Data released last week by California showed Waymo and Cruise had the greatest number of test miles between "disengagements," when a human driver must intervene to take control from a self-driving system during testing on public roads.
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The biggest news to come out of this report is from Waymo, Google's new self-driving car company, which reported a huge drop in disengagements in 2016 despite an almost equally huge increase in the number of miles driven.
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Data released Wednesday by California showed Waymo and Cruise once again had the fewest number of test miles between "disengagements," when a human driver must intervene to take control from a self-driving system during testing on public roads.
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Disengagements, counting when a human driver must take control of the vehicle — an imperfect measure, because drivers have different levels of risk aversion and receive different instructions from their companies, but widely used because of California's early requirement to report them.
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Jalopnik reported that one of the company's disengagements wasn't in the report, but the company noted that the system wasn't taken over by the driver due to either safety concerns or a system failure in that instance, hence its omission.
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In the complex world of self-driving technology where road-test data is a closely guarded secret, the number of miles between disengagements has become a key metric for industry watchers to indicate how far any player's technology has progressed.
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So companies carefully curate demo routes, avoid urban areas with cyclists and pedestrians, constrain geofences and pickup/dropoff locations, and limit the kinds of maneuvers the AV will attempt during the ride — all in order to limit the number of disengagements.
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"As we continue to develop and refine the self-driving software, we are seeing fewer disengagements" despite more miles driven, Google said in a 33-page report submitted by law to the California Department of Motor Vehicles on Dec. 31.
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Speaking of safety, Waymo says it's had a four-fold improvement in performance of its vehicles in the last year, as measured by the number of disengagements (when a safety driver has to stop the self-driving software and take over manual control).
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These 21 disengagements took place during 2485,21 miles of driving, with Google noting that its self-driving fleet drives as much in a month as two to four years of typical US adult driving (that's around 2031,21 to 11,2126 miles, says the company).
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They are useful to determine if a company is ramping up its testing on public roads, adding more AVs to its fleet, helpful for spotting trends like 'why did disengagements suddenly end?' or to determine if a company is even testing anymore.
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According to its 2018 report to the state's DMV, the automaker had four vehicles registered for testing, and reported 682.52 disengagements — or instances when the safety driver was either forced to take over or voluntarily took over driving duties from the vehicle — per 1,000 miles.
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Its total disengagement rate dropped to around 0.18 events per 1,000 miles driven, which is about 5,555 miles between disengagements on average – better than Cruise's rate, though Cruise has claimed its focus on testing in dense urban settings like San Francisco makes its training more challenging.
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The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which regulates the permits for autonomous vehicle testing on public roads in the state, requires companies to submit an annual report detailing "disengagements," a term that means the number of times drivers have had to take control of a car.
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Waymo CEO John Krafcik noted the four-fold improvement in disengagement performance when the company announced it wold be building its own sensors for its vehicles going forward, but it's interesting to get a more complete picture, including the news that it recorded 124 total disengagements in 2016, vs.
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Alphabet's self-driving company, Waymo, has been working on its own autonomous tech since 28877, for instance, and while it has vastly improved year over year, the system still sees a handful of what are known as "disengagements": Basically, when a driver has to take over for the computer.
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In the months since these top engineers have left, the 43 self-driving cars Uber had on the roads as of March 8 saw little progress when it came to decreasing the frequency of disengagements — or how many times a safety driver would have to take back control of the system.
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And while the disengagements might be few and far between, Dolgov also says that each one is crucial in terms of providing valuable learning for the system, with a rigorous process of building similar scenarios from which the learning software can benefit for each time the software has to be turned off.
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"A lower rate of disengagements shows that our cars are getting better at recognizing and handling a wide variety of driving situations, including 'edge cases' across the cities we've been testing in: those unusual situations that a human driver might see only once (or never) in a lifetime of driving," Waymo said in blog post.
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When California's Department of Motor Vehicles releases its yearly report of disengagements among the various permitted companies testing self-driving cars on roadways in the state, the general public often pays almost no attention, but the participants are often deeply invested with pointing out that it's unfair to use the data to compare efforts.
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Unlike Pennsylvania, where in September Uber launched its first pilot program, the state of California requires that companies testing autonomous tech apply for a permit with the Department of Motor Vehicles, have insurance for the technology, and publicly report data like crashes and "disengagements"—when the human operator takes back control to make sure the car operates safely.
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California requires auto companies and suppliers who test their self-driving vehicles on public roads to provide an annual compilation of miles traveled in autonomous mode and the number of "disengagements," or times the self-driving system was deactivated and control handed back to humans because of a system failure or a traffic, weather or road situation that required human intervention.
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Apple's first permits were granted in April of last year, which was late enough that the company wasn't included in the California DMV's 2017 self-driving "report cards," which track how many miles each of the companies' cars has driven, as well as the number of "disengagements" (or how many times a company's safety driver had to take over control of the self-driving test cars).
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