How much testing will prove automated cars are safe?
Image Source: 9to5Google
Statistics such as these would appear to support the adoption of fully automated vehicles, sooner rather than later - after all we all know that robots do as they’re programmed to, and seldom make mistakes… but just howgood are self-driving cars at the moment?
In 2016 a self-driving car failed about every 3 hours in California
Every January, carmakers testing self-driving cars in California have to detail how many times their vehicles malfunctioned during the preceding year. These so-called disengagement reports detail every time a human safety driver had to take control of the car, either due to hardware or software failure or because the driver anticipated a problem.
Image Source: Mark Harris from information provided by California DMV
It’s important to note that none of the 2,578 disengagements experienced by the nine companies that carried out road-testing in 2016 resulted in an accident.
While Waymo has the biggest test program, its 635,868 miles of testing accounting for over 95 percent of all the miles driven, the fleet of 60 self-driving cars out-performed all competitors with a total of 124 disengagements, 51 of them due to software problems. This represents 0.2 disengagements for every 1,000 miles, a sharp reduction in disengagements from 2015, where the company recorded 0.8.
At the other end of the scale, Bosch reported over 1,400 disengagements while covering just 983 miles in three vehicles, equivalent to 1,467 disengagements for every 1,000 miles of driving. But that doesn’t mean Waymo’s cars are 8,000 times safer than Bosch’s, as every company has its own way of determining the disengagement statistics.
For instance, Waymo does not count every single time the driver grabs the wheel to take control from the automated system, which it admits happens many thousands of times annually. Instead, the company later simulates what would have happened if the human had not intervened, and only reports disengagements where the car would have done something unsafe. It calculates that if its drivers had taken no action at all, nine disengagements in 2016 would have led to the car hitting an obstacle or another road user. That is down from 13 the previous year, despite covering 50 percent more miles.
The other problem with comparing disengagement rates is that different companies are using California’s testing permits for a wide range of programs. Only Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise Automation have extensive, general-purpose testing programs. In its first year on the state’s roads, Cruise’s two dozen cars went from covering less than 5 miles in June 2015 to over 2,000 miles in September 2016. Its disengagement rate also plummeted over the same period, from over 500 to under 3 per 1,000 miles.
Of particular interest is Tesla’s disengagement report: In 2015, the company reported no disengagements at all, suggesting that it either carried out no public testing in California or that its cars were flawless. In 2016, after switching to Autopilot V2, its report declared 182 disengagements over 550 miles of autonomous driving.
Read more : https://www.automotive-iq.com/autonomous-drive/articles/how-much-testing-will-prove-automated-cars-are-safe