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Category: Self-driving

California’s interesting data on autonomous cars

The DMV-website has a couple of reports that it requires companies licensed to test autonomous vehicles on Californian roads to report annually. One is the Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Report that was the first time due January 1st 2016 reporting all incidents when a the system or a human driver disengages the autonomous mode and takes over manual control of the car.

Another report is the one on Traffic Accident Involving an Autonomous Vehicle.

Currently (May 31st, 2016) the DMV has issued testing permits for autonomous vehicles on public roads for 13 entities:

  1. Volkswagen Group of America
  2. Mercedes Benz
  3. Google
  4. Delphi Automotive
  5. Tesla Motors
  6. Bosch
  7. Nissan
  8. Cruise Automation
  9. BMW
  10. Honda
  11. Ford
  12. Zoox, Inc.
  13. Drive.ai, Inc.

Eight of them were required to file the disengagement report beginning of this year, and the reports reveal the intensity of testing. Several companies test vehicles around the globe and only listed those incidents that occurred on Californian roads.

Company # of vehicles
in report
# of
accidents
# of
disengagements
Miles driven
in CA 2015
 Bosch 2 0 625 935
 Delphi  1  0  405  16,662
 Google  57 9  272 424,331
 Nissan 4 0 106 1,485
 Mercedes-Benz 5  0 1,031 2,239
 Tesla Motors 0  0 0 0
 Volkswagen Group 2  0 260  14,945
Total 71  9 2,699 473,966

What immediately catches the eye is how far ahead Google is with the testing. In 2015 its cars drove 10 times as many miles as the other seven companies combined. It also tops the others by a factor of 4 in the number of vehicles it has on the ground. The accident report lists between 2014 and 2016 fifteen accidents in total, of which 9 occured in 2015, all reported by Google. None of the 2015 accidents were caused by the self-driving vehicle.