Waymo's self-driving cars needed a lot less human intervention in 2018

Waymo likes to boast that its self-driving cars can handle tough situations, and now it has some extra data to back up its claims. The California DMV has published manufacturers' reports for autonomous vehicle disengagements (moments when a human had to intervene), and Waymo's disengagement rate fell in 2018 to 0.09 for every 1,000 driverless miles -- that's half as many instances as in 2017. To Waymo, that's evidence the cars are better at dealing with "edge cases," those once-in-a-lifetime situations that used to require human adaptability. The Alphabet-owned brand added that it now has over 10 million real-world miles to date, and more than 7 billion simulated miles. GM's Cruise Automation was comparable to Waymo's 2017 with an 0.19 disengagement rate, while the next-closest performances were from startups like Zoox (0.50), Nuro (0.97) and Pony.AI (0.98).