Let?s start with the caveats. The annual reports on autonomous testing in California required by the state?s Department of Motor Vehicles are far from a perfect measure of any company?s self-driving competence.
These reports, including the latest batch, released last week, provide some fresh details on the circumstances surrounding when and why a self-driving system is disengaged during testing. What they don?t offer is much context.
Using only these reports, it can be problematic to make comparisons of autonomous progress, because one company?s low number of disengagements may occur during testing on empty highways, while another company?s high number may have occurred during testing in busy urban areas.
Comparisons are problematic because some companies place more value on testing in real-world scenarios while others put more emphasis on simulation, and sometimes engineers might be purposely disengaging to validate their systems. Some companies might concentrate their autonomous development efforts in states other than California, the only one that mandates disengagement information from these companies that are bent on altering the future of vehicular travel.
Further, interpretation of the reports can be thorny because the definition of what constitutes a reportable disengagement has some degree of latitude, and some companies may choose to report certain events while others opt not to disclose nearly identical ones. California regulators and consumers who scrutinize...