New year, new statistics: 19 entities that received a permit for testing autonomous cars from the California DMV submitted their Disengagement Reports. A disengagement is a situation, when an autonomous vehicle gets confused and has to hand over control of the car to a safety driver, or when the safety driver overrules the car.

These 19 companies operated 230 vehicles for test drives in California. The number more than doubled from 2016. Many of the companies operate many more test cars in other states and countries.

Company Number of Vehicles

2015 2016 2017 Baidu 0 1 4 BMW 0 1 1 Bosch 2 3 3 Delphi/Aptiv 1 2 1 Drive.ai 0 0 7 Ford 0 2 25 GMCruise 0 25 95 Google / Waymo 57 60 75 Honda 0 0 0 Mercedes 5 1 1 NIO 0 1 5 Nissan 4 5 5 NVIDIA 0 1 2 Telenav 0 1 1 Tesla 0 4 0 Valeo 0 1 1 VW 2 0 0 Wheego 0 1 0 Zoox 0 1 11 Total 71 103 235

Most interesting is the number of disengagements per miles driven. The numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt, as the companies have some room for interpretation what a disengagement that is worth being reported to the DMV really is.

Company Number of Disengagements Number of Miles driven Disengagements per 1,000 Miles 2015 2016 2017 2015 2016 2017 2015 2016 2017 Baidu 48 – 1,971 24.4 BMW 1 – 638 – 1.6 – Bosch 625 1,442 598 935 983 2,310 668.5 1,466.9 414.1 Delphi/

Aptiv 405 178 81 16,662 3,125 1,811 24.3 57.0 44,7 Drive.ai 59 151 6,582 22.9 Ford 3 – 590 – 5.1 – GMCruise 181 105 9,776 131,676 18.5 0.8 Google/

Waymo 341 124 63 424,331 635,868 352,545 0.8 0.2 0.18 Honda – – – – Mercedes 1,031 336 842 336 2,239 1,088 460.5 499.3 774.1 NIO – – – Nissan 106 29 24 1,485 4,099 5,007 71.4 7.1 4,8 NVIDIA 109 505 215.8 Telenav 57 1,824 31.3 Tesla 180 – 550 – 327.3 – Valeo 215 574 374.5 VW 260 – – 23.912 0 – 17.4 – – Wheego – – – Zoox 14 3,961 3.53 Total 2,768 2,474 450,597 656,302 507,016



The total mileage driven in 2017 dropped in comparison to 2016, which is mainly due to Waymo moving a large portion of its testing to other states, most prominently to Arizona. Waymo drove ‘only’ slightly more than half of the miles in 2016. Other companies have ramped up their own efforts. GM Cruise for instance reached 131,676 miles this year And also other companies such as Zoox, Telenav, Drive.ai or Baidu drove several thousand miles each.

As we can see, Waymo and GMCruise have the by far best disengagement rates. Waymo cars can drive on average over 5,500 miles before the system disengages. GM Cruise cars as second placed on average have to disengage every 1,000 miles and more.

The worst ranked is Mercedes, which has to hand over almost every mile. Also Bosch doesn’t fare better with every 2 to 3 miles. Considering how long those two companies have been working on autonomous cars, this seems astonishing. But it also shows that developing cars is mostly a software problem and that’s where companies with a software background have an advantage.

The numbers confirm Waymo’s lead and its confidence that had the company now order several thousands of new cars for its autonomous fleets that move beyond testing into operation and deployment. The other companies still have a long way to go to deploy such cars on the streets without creating huge hazards.

This article has also been published in German.