Uber’s autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile, according to documents – Recode (Mar 16, 2017)
One of the great things about autonomous driving technology is that regulators require companies to keep track of how those cars are performing, and in the case of California that data is published annually, providing a great insight into how each company’s technology is advancing. However, occasionally, internal documents on testing emerge that provide lots of detail too, and such documents have apparently been leaked to Recode (and BuzzFeed). There’s lots of interesting data here, and it suggests progress is being made and Uber is driving lots of miles in its various cars. It’s worth comparing some of the numbers here for Uber with those reported by other companies in California by way of putting them in context: Uber says its rate of disengagements per mile is 0.8, for example, whereas Waymo’s cars in California are now at a rate of 0.2 per 1000 miles, or some 4,000 times better. Now, Waymo’s cars have been driving in the state for much longer than Uber’s, but that’s still a massive discrepancy in performance. And it’s also worse than Tesla’s rate of 182 disengagements over 550 miles driven in 2016. So it appears Uber has a long way still to go in autonomous driving, and it’s therefore remarkable that it’s already using these cars to ferry real passengers around Pittsburgh.
via Recode
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