[jakarta]

Waymo progress seems to be slowing on critical disengagements (in older CA DMV reports these were called "safe operation disengagements" - they stopped reporting this type in 2017). These disengagements deal with perception issues, the software leading to unwanted maneuvers, inability to react to reckless road users, and incorrect predictions.

You can see it reduced rate of improvement when you dig into the numbers:

2015 0.16 disengagements per 1000 miles

2016 0.13 disengagements per 1000 miles

2017 0.12 disengagements per 1000 miles

[Retric]

Looking at miles before disengagement shows things a little differently.

  2015: ~6250
  2016: ~7692 (+1442)
  2017: ~8333 (+641)

Personally, I think a self driving car with 1 notified disengagement per year as perfectly usable. Not so useful for the blind, but still very helpful.

That said, even reporting the same number every year could still represent progress if they keep pushing the car harder. AKA, if 2015 = highway driving in the day with nice weather, 2017 = inner city driving at night in a snowstorm the same number of disengagements would still represent a lot of progress.

[jschwartzi]

This is a serious problem if you have to take over during disengagement. If you spend most of the year not driving you risk falling out of practice, and then the one time you must rely on your own skill is in an unusual situation requiring you to exercise good judgement at speed. I would expect most disengagements to result in accidents because of this.

[lsc]

There was a bunch of research on this a while back, essentially saying the driver needs to be paying driving level attention the whole time or the car needs to handle itself completely; you can't just expect someone to go from not driving to driving at 60mph without warning.

I mean, you can probably design autonomous "disengage" modes- hitting the emergency blinkers and heading for the breakdown lane is the extreme default. On a lesser level, the thing could just drive like I do. If a merge is too tricky? Just keep going straight, and recalculate on the next exit.

This is helped by that fact that modern cars seem to have pretty good "Just don't run into something" sensors already, and from my own experience as a bad driver with a decent accident record, not running into other things is most of the battle.

So yeah, I could totally see autonomous cars evolving the ability to safely get themselves off the road. Of course, you're still gonna need to do that a lot less often than every three thousand miles, but you don't have to get it to zero, just around the point where normal cars break down mechanically.

[Retric]

I don't think people are going to enter their destination for every trip. So, people will still do some driving even with self driving systems.

On top of that most situations with disengagement have not resulted in crashes. Really it's failing to pay attention during normal driving that's most often at fault, a 'buzzing you need to pay attention now' system solves most of the problems even if the car is not driving it's self.

[stevenwoo]

You make fair points, but didn't Waymo first show cars with no steering wheel whatsoever as their target? I have only see the Waymo branded vans in recent months, not the tiny custom cars (forgot the name of them).

[Retric]

WePod and some other companies already have self driving buses doing limited routes in foot traffic. Which is basically the Waymo tiny car demo.

It turns out to be significantly easier problem than full speed road traffic. Which IMO is why google gave up on that concept demo.

[jacquesm]

> Personally, I think a self driving car with 1 notified disengagement per year as perfectly usable.

Funny, I interpret that as one guaranteed accident every year. Because by the time the autopilot disengages you can be sure the driver is after being lulled to sleep for the last 8000+ miles in no position to step into the situation in time to avoid a crash.

[Retric]

You assume crash avoidance is the only reason a car would give up.

Self driving cars however have two goals, not hit anything AND got somewhere specific. It seems likely a car would disengage if it encountered a blocked road even if it did not hit anything. In that context we may see many cases where a car stops and 'gives up' which are in no way safety related and have no real safty risks.

While we don't nessisarily know the specifics, people have been testing these self driving cars for a while and yet crashing seems very rare even with unexpected handoffs.

[jacquesm]

I would hope in those situations it would just stop and not disengage.

It should remain in control until commanded to disengage. After all, blocked roads will be freed at some point and even if they don't it is the AI's problem to get itself out of any trouble that it got itself into. And even if a blocked road might seem to be free of safety risks that doesn't mean you can abandon the car there, you're supposed to stay in control of the vehicle until it is parked.

The only situation that I can compare disengaging with is when there is stopped traffic in the mountains and the snow moves in, that's one of those situations where you might be ordered by the authorities to abandon your vehicle and seek shelter (assuming this is possible and not less safe than staying with the car). Those situations can take many days to sort out afterwards. But in almost all other situations that normally would occur you should stay in and in control of your car, so I'd assume the same would go for an AI based system.

[Retric]

While that may be desirable if the car is operating alone in production, in testing just about anything it's not sure of should probably result in a disengagement. From my sensors are giving conflicting information with my map, to I failed to read that sign... they all should probably result in a hand off.

After that hand off someone can look at the test data and chose a better response, but caution when operating a deadly vehicle is causation is perfectly appropriate.

[jacquesm]

Agreed, but in that case it shouldn't be on public roads to begin with. If your software is so bad that the solution to complex situation is to throw up its hands and panic it has no place in traffic. After all, there are plenty of situations where inaction is just as dangerous or even more dangerous than action.

I feel pretty weird in the knowledge that people are operating vehicles with what to me comes across as barely out of beta software on roads shared with others.