Google: Self-driving cars improve, but still need human help

Here’s an interesting statistic: in the last 14 months, Google’s autonomous cars have almost been in at least 13 crashes and have needed to revert to manual control 341 times, according to a new report filed by the Mountain View firm with the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

Also, as Google notes, the technology is still in development, so engineers don’t necessarily want to keep disengagements from happening because every mistake is a chance to build more fail-proof software.

Google’s fleet of 53 driverless cars, now being tested on roads in California and Texas, have never been at fault in an accident.

The Guardian points out that Google actually says that its drivers took over “many thousands of times”, but “the company is reporting only 69 incidents because Google thinks California’s regulations require it to only report disengagements where drivers were justified in taking over, and not those where the vehicle would have coped on its own”. “That’s exactly why we test our vehicles with a steering wheel and pedals”.

Google will need to add to the number of partners to develop the next phase of its self-driving project, but the president of that project did not name any of those partners-to-be.

The head of the company’s self-driving auto project said that while the results are encouraging, they also show the technology has yet to reach his goal of not needing someone behind the wheel. Even minor incidents between human drivers and Google’s cars have garnered media scrutiny because of the huge interest in the technology.

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday released reports filed by seven companies the agency gave permission to test prototype vehicles in public.

“It’s informative, but it shouldn’t be treated as a true measure of the vehicle’s safety”, said Aaron Steinfeld, a Carnegie Mellon professor who researches human-robot interaction.

Google released its report Tuesday before the agency posted reports from other companies in what Google described as an effort to be transparent about its safety record.

The reports, which are mandated under California law and cover October 2014 through November 2015, detail times when the self-driving vehicles “disengaged” from autonomous mode. That rate has improved in recent months, according to Google data. Google said two involved traffic cones, and three were due to “another driver’s reckless behavior”. Google says that’s because the cars were pushed into more hard circumstances.

These situations happened once every 785 miles in late 2014 but once every 5,318 miles in the fourth quarter of 2015. In each case, the other auto was responsible, according to an analysis by researchers at Virginia Tech University.