As Cruise set out in 2017 to verify the safety of its self-driving vehicles, it came up with a set of milestones to measure progress in its software development. These milestones, which measure the frequency and severity of safety incidents, offer a rare view of how autonomous vehicle developers judge the quality of their software, and the progress they’re making toward commercializing self driving cars.

They also highlight that even after years of progress, Cruise still doesn’t expect its automated driving system to match human performance. Instead, based on the company’s 2017 calculations, the system it has at the end of this year is expected to be 5% to 11% as safe as human-level driving, in terms of the frequency of crashes. (See related article here.)