A New Robo-Car Report Card Isn't Quite What It Seems

The latest batch of autonomous vehicle developer disengagement reports--the closest thing we've got to a robo-report card--has just been published by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The columns and columns of data contained therein don't quite illuminate the secrets of the very secretive self-driving vehicle industry. But its many pages make clear that while the Silicon Valley hype around robocars may have cooled, progress toward the day when humans are unshackled from the steering wheel continues: The 48 autonomous vehicle developers that tested their tech on public roads collectively drove 2.05 million miles between December 2017 and November 2018, up from 500,000 the year before. These reports spell out how many times each company's vehicle "disengaged" out of autonomous mode and switched back to the old fashioned human-hand-on-the-wheel manual mode. Waymo, for example, reported that a driver had to take over once every 11,017 miles, 97 percent better than a year ago.