"Google had operated its self-driving cars in autonomous mode for
more than 1.3 million miles. Of those miles, 424,331 occurred on public roads in California during the
period covered by this report" So, you where talking about a specific report not the overall system, got it.
Our objective is not to minimize
disengagements; rather, it is to gather, while operating safely, as much data as possible to enable us to
improve our self-driving system. Therefore, we set disengagement thresholds conservatively, and each
is carefully recorded.
That's a long way from falling asleep at the wheel. That's we don't want to put people at risk so we are going to hand off control if "Disengage for a recklessly behaving agent" etc.
As you correctly point out disengagements may not be the equivalent of falling asleep: they might simply be the equivalent of the driving instructor adjudging the learner at the wheel to be looking a bit too nervous, or just not ready for the junction that's coming up yet. And yes, its assumptions on the type of "software discrepancy" and "unwanted maneuver" that prompt human input are conservative by design.
But the report actually goes so far to points out that on at least 13 of those occasions Google believes that without human intervention a crash would have occurred. It also implies that only 3 of those situations were created by poor driving on the part of another human. That's a definite crash due to Google car error averted every ~40k miles, even though humans already take over whenever there's a software warning, a spot of rain or something else that they think might stretch its capabilities too much.
The average US driver has 1 accident per 165000 miles (which, like the unusual tendency for the Google car to get bumped when stopping at junctions, may or may not be their fault) and that's including DUI as well as people driving in slightly more difficult conditions than sunny surburban California.
> The average US driver has 1 accident per 165000 miles (which, like the unusual tendency for the Google car to get bumped when stopping at junctions, may or may not be their fault) and that's including DUI as well as people driving in slightly more difficult conditions than sunny surburban California.
The average driver doesn't do all city miles and that's why Google's cars have gotten bumped. Highway driving is much easier to automate (several cars already do this today) and makes up a large percentage of total miles driven.
Disengagements while on public roads is the only representative metric. The real world is more challenging than whatever artificial testing environment Google has on their private roads.
Our objective is not to minimize disengagements; rather, it is to gather, while operating safely, as much data as possible to enable us to improve our self-driving system. Therefore, we set disengagement thresholds conservatively, and each is carefully recorded.
That's a long way from falling asleep at the wheel. That's we don't want to put people at risk so we are going to hand off control if "Disengage for a recklessly behaving agent" etc.