Google's Waymo Self-Driving Car Release Date News, Update: DMV Report Shows Significant Improvements for Google's Autonomous Tech
The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) recently released its annual report that evaluates all the self-driving cars that are currently being tested in the state. Results have revealed that Waymo, the autonomous car company that spun-off from Google's self-driving car project, is leading the pack in terms of year-over-year improvements.
According to the DMV's Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Report for 2016, Waymo's self-driving car is experiencing failures at a much lower rate compared with other companies. This is despite the substantial increase in the number of miles that Waymo has driven.
The DMV considers it a disengagement "when a failure of the autonomous technology is detected" or "when the safe operation of the vehicle requires that the autonomous vehicle test driver disengage the autonomous mode and take immediate manual control of the vehicle."
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Based on the findings in the report, Google's Waymo had 0.20 disengagements per 1,000 miles in 2016, which is a significant improvement from the 0.8 disengagements per 1,000 miles that were reported in 2015.
In the past year, reportable disengages were also down to 124 from 2015's 341.
Improvements in Waymo's self-driving car's performance is even more impressive considering that the company has engaged in 50 percent more testing in 2016 — racking up 635,868 miles. The year prior, Waymo's self-driving car had driven 424,331 miles.
Reacting to the recently published report, Waymo's head of self-driving technology, Dmitri Dolgov, had this to say:
"This four-fold improvement reflects the significant work we've been doing to make our software and hardware more capable and mature. And because we're creating a self-driving car that can take you from door to door, almost all our time has been spent on complex urban or suburban streets. This has given us valuable experience sharing the road safely with pedestrians and cyclists, and practicing advanced maneuvers such as making unprotected left turns and traversing multi-lane intersections."
While the term "failure" is not usually positively perceived, Dolgov explained that they have been learning from these disengages in order to pave the way for drastic improvements in the company's technology. These experiences have exposed them to some of the toughest road conditions that people may encounter. With that, they are able to tweak their platform so that it can later on anticipate these kinds of events and prevent road fatalities from occurring.
