California DMV disengagements reports are out for 2019, and it’s time to plot some knowledge.
As typical, these quantity usually are not actually measuring reliably the protection of AV’s and there are loads methods to recreation them, or overreport. Please discuss with my last years post for a deeper discussion (and 2017 post here, 2018 post here) on why these numbers are primarily flawed. However these are the one official numbers we get, the one glimpse of transparency into this big company endeavor referred to as the « self driving automotive ».
First the disclaimer – this knowledge got here from
- California DMV disengagement reviews for years 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015
- Insurance Institute for Highway Safety fatality data.
- RAND driving to safety report.
- Bureau of Transportation Statistics
all which is definitely verifiable. And so right here comes the plot everyone seems to be ready for (click on to enlarge):
And as typical a fast commentary:
Initially, the one gamers who actually have a quantity anyplace within the neighborhood of attention-grabbing are Waymo, Cruise and Baidu. I will focus on Baidu later, since their sudden bounce in efficiency appears a bit extraordinary. However even Waymo and Cruise disengagements are nonetheless roughly an order of magnitude from the higher sure of human crash charge. Would each disengagement end in a crash? Possible not, however how California DMV defines these occasions and the way Waymo and Cruise are reporting them, probably a lot of these might end result with a fairly dangerous end result. Once more please discuss with my longer dialogue in 2019 post the place I cite the definitions. If the development traces on the log-plot have been to carry, we should always not count on a safely deployable AV before in 10 years. My private guess is that until there’s a actual breakthrough in AI, these curves will asymptote close to to the place they’re now for a very long time (that asymptote is already fairly seen with Waymo).
Baidu appears to have made a terrific progress, a lot so, that their numbers look cooked to me. Final 12 months I didn’t even embody them within the plot since they solely drove 20k miles, this 12 months alternatively they drove extra however their disengagement charge appears unbelievably low. Both they superior the tech past what anybody had ever seen, or they have been merely spinning their automobiles in circles on some effectively marked freeway on a sunny day for a number of weeks (a easy method to recreation these numbers).
Final however not least is Tesla. They lastly have recorded some autonomous testing miles with the DMV, all 12.2 of them. Sure, Tesla had 12 autonomous testing miles recorded final 12 months. That is actually suspicious since as many might bear in mind Tesla held an « autonomy day » final 12 months the place they’ve demoed their capabilities and even apparently gave autonomous rides to some buyers. Now given the DMV quantity, it seems to be like most of those demos and drives have been certainly not even thought of autonomous, therefore they have been merely a hoax to dupe buyers (or alternatively Tesla « forgot » to report them to the DMV). Given Musks famous integrity and honesty, both wouldn’t be too stunning.
Since final 12 months some voices began to publicly acknowledge what everybody with half a mind and any information within the matter knew a very long time in the past – that these disengagement numbers are really very close to meaningless.
Actually the entire concept that we might infer security if these autos through statistical phrases is quite misguided, since all the danger is within the tail of the distribution right here and it seems to be to be a rather long tail.
However, I not too long ago went to Phoenix and needed to permit Waymo to persuade me that I am unsuitable. In a response to my tweet Waymo claimed they’d be holding a fest on the day I used to be on the town and that rides could be obtainable. So I confirmed up on the fest.
Turned out that two hours into the fest they have been out of rides… They allotted 4 automobiles for that occasion (they’ve tons of within the space so far as I do know). The logical conclusion to me was that it’s only a canine and pony present – in the event that they certainly had the know-how working (sure at the least on a sunny day in Phoenix suburb), there could be nothing stopping them from operating these rides all day lengthy, or a least at some point of a 3 hour fest. However apparently this isn’t the case.
Anyway, that is it for now, I’ve an extended submit on the AI panorama usually in preparation, however would possibly want some extra time to complete it.
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