Every year, companies that operate self-driving cars in California are required to submit data to the state's Department of Motor Vehicles listing the number of miles driven and the frequency at which human safety drivers were forced to take control of their autonomous vehicles (also known as a "disengagement"). And every year, those same companies raise a huge stink about it. Waymo, which drove 1.45 million miles in California in 2019 and logged a disengagement rate of 0.076 per 1,000 self-driven miles, says the metric "does not provide relevant insights" into its technology. Cruise, which drove 831,040 miles last year and reported a disengagement rate of 0.082, says the "idea that disengagements give a meaningful signal about whether an [autonomous vehicle] is ready for commercial deployment is a myth." Aurora, which only drove 13,429 miles and recorded a disengagement rate of 10.6 per 1,000 miles, calls them "misguided."

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.

Apple's self-driving cars may have a long way to go before they're ready to ride. That's one of the takeaways from a new report published Wednesday by California's Department of Motor Vehicles, which includes data on all the companies testing self-driving vehicles in the state. Among the other firms included the report are Google's Waymo, Uber, General Motors and BMW. Apple's self-driving cars may have a long way to go before they're fully autonomous, as a new report from California's DMV showed it had the highest disengagement rates of any firm there.

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).