Google’s Self-Driving Company, Waymo, Improves Their Fleet

Self-driving cars. They’re the future. Yet, many people aren’t sure if they would feel safe in an autonomous car. What if it doesn’t respond well and suddenly they’re in a car accident because of their car? Well rest assured, because self-driving vehicles go through a lot of rigorous testing before hitting the road. Even Google’s autonomous car company, Waymo, still hasn’t released a car for the public, continuing to tinker with it for a perfect automatic ride.

Google may have been the first to develop a self-driving car, but they aren’t the only one out there. Many car brands and tech companies are working on their own version of self-driving cars. In the last few years, Google has partnered up with Chrysler and other top name car brands. Speaking of, many car brands are starting to debut autonomous cars at auto shows, one of which is Chrysler’s futuristic self-driving concept car, shown off at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show. With many auto brands in the autonomous car race, Google needs to step it up.

Sources say Waymo is leaning towards letting the public test their self-driving cars on a trial basis sometime this year. But is it really safe? Well, the California Department of Motor Vehicles recently released its annual autonomous vehicle disengagement report, and it includes data provided by Waymo.

Among the data is a record of how many times a disengagement occurred during driving.  For this report, “disengagement” means a human driver had to take control or intervene when the car was in “self-driving” mode. Other disengagements can also consist of “software glitches,” “unwanted maneuvers,” “perception discrepancies,” and “recklessly behaving road user.”

In a single year, Google improved the Waymo greatly. In 2015, Waymo reports there were  0.8 safety-related disengagements per thousand miles, and 341 regular disengagements over a course of several hundred thousand miles. In 2016, Waymo vehicles drove over 600,000 miles with only 124 human-driver interactions. The safety-related disengages also dropped to 0.2 per thousand miles. That’s more than a 50 percent decrease on both accounts, and no reports of crashes or accidents.

Dmitri Dolgov, Head of Waymo’s self-driving technology, wrote this in a recent blog post:

“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.”

So there you have it. Waymo is getting pretty close to the finish line. Now they just need to make sure it can handle the highway, as that’s how a lot of people get from point A to point B on any given day.

Photo Source: Autoguide.com