Every January, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) releases data from companies that operated highly automated vehicles on the state’s public roads the previous year. By law, each company must report how many times a safety driver took control from an autonomous vehicle, either because the system had failed or because the human was worried it had.
Companies get to decide how to record these so-called disengagements. In 2017, for instance, relative newcomer Nvidia logged every single time a human touched the steering wheel of its test vehicle, even at the planned end of a test. Waymo, on the other hand, ran complex computer simulations after each disengagement, and only reported to the DMV those where it believed the driver was correct to take charge, rather than being overly-cautious. GM chose not to report at least one instance where an autonomous car was about to block an intersection.
