Waymo Has The Smallest Number Of Disengagements Per Mile While Apple Has The Biggest

Waymo is currently the market leader in the self-driving vehicle field due to the huge support from Alphabet, a multinational conglomerate and a wealth of experience in the field. When it comes to AV-testing, Apple is the exact opposite.

Last week, the Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports for the year 2018 was published and here is a summary of how some of the companies in the field did.

Waymo is by far the best performer

Waymo was the best performer with 0.09 disengagements for every 1,000 miles. In other words, with the number of miles the company’s vehicle covered in 2018, there is one disengagement for every 11.000 miles. The majority of these incidents are the undesired maneuver that was not wanted for the situation. A small portion was the result of reckless road users.

Apple was at the bottom of the list with 871.65 disengagement events for every 1,000 miles. Apply the same analyzing formula here and we have a conclusion that each incident happens after an average of 1.1 miles.

These companies had quite a lot of freedom when it comes to describing the disengagements. At this category, Apple also ended up the end of the list with the least detailed reasons like “controls” and “manual takeovers”. On the other end of the spectrum is Zoox with reason as detailed as inconsistency in prediction, the wrong yield trajectory when the vehicle went out of the intersection.

Zoox's description in their report is in detail

Please note that the Zoox, Apple, and Waymo are different in so many aspects that these above comparisons might not reflect the entire situation. The routes’ difficulty levels and the distance covered vary greatly. For example, Zoox might finish at the third place but its total distance was only 30,000 miles while Waymo’s fleet ran more than 1.26 million miles. However, the report is still a reliable source of information to find out why Apple stagnates and Waymo excels.

The disengagement reports are essential for any organization that tests autonomous vehicles in the state of California. The term disengagement can be explained as when an AV has to hand over a driver the control of the vehicle.