2023 Disengagement Reports from California

It’s February again, and that’s when the California DMV releases its annual Disengagement Report, or more accurately, the data that goes with it. A so-called disengagement report is required from the 38 companies currently licensed to test autonomous cars on public roads in California. This has been in place for a number of years, I have documented 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Each year, license holders must indicate how many autonomous test and commercial vehicles they had in operation from 1 December to 30 November, how many miles or kilometers they drove, and how many disengagements there were. A disengagement can be described as an event in which the autonomous vehicle either did not know what to do and handed over control to a safety driver present in the vehicle, or when a safety driver took over control themselves. The latter is the case, for example, when the vehicle was about to make a mistake or was unable to find its way out of a traffic situation.

You can already see from this definition that it is at the discretion of the licensee what is reported as a disengagement. Often, an overzealous safety driver takes control, where it turns out in the simulation that the vehicle would have handled the situation itself. Also, fewer interventions are to be expected on highways than in suburbs or in cities such as San Francisco, where there are many different road users. In this respect, the figures reported and published by the companies should be treated with caution. However, I am interpreting and presenting them anyway because California is currently the only region in the world where we have such data publicly available and they offer a small insight into the progress and status of the development of autonomous vehicles.

In total, fewer than 40 companies reported data for the entire year (1 December 2022 to 30 November 2023), one did not submit the mandatory report and consequently lost its license. 20 companies did not report any activities, which is why only 21 companies are represented in the following analysis. Furthermore, 6 manufacturers (Apollo, AutoX, Nuro, Waymo, WeRide, Zoox) are currently licensed to operate the vehicles without safety drivers, three are allowed to operate them commercially (Mercedes-Benz, Nuro, Waymo)

Reports with Safety Drivers

First of all, it’s about the reports on journeys with safety drivers in the vehicle. A total of 1603 autonomous vehicles were in operation in California during the period, an increase of 6.4 percent over last year’s 1,507. Cruise had the most with 510 vehicles (but they have been completely off the roads since October 2023 due to a crash). Waymo had 438 vehicles and Zoox 281.

All manufacturers together covered a total of 9,282,681 kilometers (5,801,675 miles), slightly less than last year, when all vehicles together covered 9,543,686 kilometers (5,964,804 miles). Waymo again achieved the most kilometers, with 5,872,940 kilometers (3,669,962 miles), 27 percent more than last year’s 4,640,230 kilometers (2,900,144 miles). Zoox reached 1,136,655 kilometers (710,409 miles) and Cruise was 933,799 kilometers (583,624 miles), well below last year’s mileage of 2,761,955 kilometers (1,726,222 miles). Apple massively increased its mileage, reaching 724,390 kilometers (452,744 miles), putting it in fourth place for most kilometers driven.

As always, the present evaluation of how many kilometers a vehicle drives autonomously before a safety driver has to intervene should be treated with caution, as the way in which a disengagement is determined is left to the companies. In total, the companies reported 6,570 disengagements, of which three companies reported none (AutoX, Cruise, Mercedes-Benz). These are not listed in the following chart.

A new inclusion in the reported data is the evaluation of whether the safety driver, the autonomous driving system or both have initiated a disengagement. Here is the evaluation of the data from the individual companies. We can see that 84 percent of all disengagements are made by the safety driver.

	Driver	AV System	Both
aiMotive	687		21
Apollo	2	1
Apple	2,391	803
Aurora	47
Bosch	159	155
Didi	1
Gatik AI	1	1
Ghost Autonomy	976	58
Imagry	124
Motional	593
Nissan	17
Nuro	47
Qualcomm	197
Valeo	20	1
Waymo	191	21
WeRide	2
Woven Planet	42
Zoox	4
	5,501	1,040	21

Driverless Reports

Six companies (Apollo, AutoX, Nuro, Waymo, WeRide and Zoox) have a driverless license and reported figures. In total, five of the companies (Apollo, Cruise, Nuro, Waymo and WeRide) completed 5.2 million driverless kilometers (3.3 million miles) in the same period. At 524 percent, this is more than five times as many kilometers as last year.

	Miles	Kilometers
Apollo (Baidu)	578	924
Cruise	2,064,728	3,303,565
Nuro	2,244	3,590
Waymo	1,188,928	1,902,285
WeRide	51	924
Zoox	11,263	18,021
	3,267,792	5,228,467

Conclusion

There have been several high-impact events this year. On the one hand, Cruise and Waymo were granted a license to commercially operate robotaxi fleets in August, but then Cruise’s accident thwarted these plans for the GM subsidiary. Nevertheless, we see that the activities have not decreased, but the driverless trips and the kilometers driven in this way have increased massively. As previously reported, Waymo has applied to expand its operations and Zoox has also opened a waiting list for interested parties. Apple’s intensified efforts also appear to be noteworthy.

This article was also published in German.