Google's self-driving cars still need humans, says company report
Google aims to release its self autonomous cars to the public by 2020 but, as of today, the company鈥檚 self-driving cars still need human intervention to avoid software failures and prevent car accidents.
The company filed with California鈥檚 Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday that documented the number of times the test drivers of the cars had to manually take control of the cars 鈥� in what is referred as 鈥渄isengagement鈥� 鈥� to ensure safety
showed that from September 2014 to November 2015, there were 341 disengagements in total, 272 of which were caused by technical related glitches, while the remaining 69 resulted from instances where the test drivers grabbed the wheel to avoid possible accidents.
The disengagements did not necessarily stem from dangerous situations, according to the company. The report says that the threshold for the 鈥渋mmediate manual control鈥� is set conservatively, because they are trying to collect as much data as possible to improve self-driving cars before they release them to the public.
The report shows that 272 of the disengagements resulted from hardware issue such as broken wires and software issues such as a faulty GPS. In 13 of the 69 incidences where the test drivers manually grabbed the wheel, they did so to avoid possible collision with careless drivers and pedestrians on the roads. The drivers received audio and visual signals to alert them when the car was about to disengage, and took control of the car in an average of 0.84 seconds.
The company is focused on making fully autonomous self-driving cars, unlike Tesla and General Motors, which are starting with partially autonomous systems and aims to gradually upgrade them over a period of time.
鈥淭he industry has been making continuous incremental gains, but for self-driving cars to reach their full potential we need to focus on nothing short of full autonomy,鈥� John Krafcik, chief executive of Google鈥檚 self-driving car, 鈥淎iming for full autonomy not only reaches the most people, our team believes it鈥檚 also the safest approach. Having this audacious goal was what drew me to the Google self-driving car project,鈥� he added.
In December, the California's Department of Motor Vehicles rolled out for the use of driverless cars on public roads. The regulations would allow the public to lease self-driving cars from companies such as Google and Tesla, but won鈥檛 allow anyone to purchase a fully autonomous car. The regulations also stated that participants would have to undergo special training in addition to having a normal license.
While the data indicates that the company is far from achieving its goal of full autonomy, the overall disengagements fell from one per 785 miles in the one per 5,318 miles during the report's time period.
