FILE PHOTO: A self-driving car from PolySync drives on the track during a self-racing cars event at Thunderhill Raceway in Willows, California, U.S., April 1, 2017. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
February 26, 2020
(Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s <GOOGL.O> Waymo, widely considered the front-runner in self-driving vehicles, on Wednesday joined a growing chorus of dissenters panning a California requirement on reporting test data, as the state released 2019 results.
Waymo tweeted that the metric, called disengagements, is not an accurate or relevant way to measure a company’s technical progress, even though it is widely used to do that.
“The disengagement metric does not provide relevant insights” nor does it distinguish Waymo’s “performance from others in the self-driving space,” the company said.
California requires self-driving companies to provide disengagement data on how often a human driver must intervene to take control from a self-driving system during testing on public roads.
Other self-driving companies, including General Motors Co’s <GM.N> Cruise and California startup Aurora also have criticized the disengagement data.
(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru and Paul Lienert in Detroit; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Richard Chang)
