Self-driving cars from Uber still often need adjustments

Internal documents from Uber, which owns the website Recode, show that although Uber’s self-driving cars are driving more and more autonomously, the safety driver has to intervene and take over the driving on average every 1.3 km.

Uber made no progress in the six-week period in the number of times that occupant safety drivers in the self-driving cars have to intervene and therefore have to take over the controls of the computer. This is evident from Uber’s own figures to track progress.

Taking over control involves non-routine interventions, whereby there was no risk of accidents in the event of non-intervention. Examples of this are intervening if the system has difficulty with unclear road markings or driving in bad, stormy weather. At the beginning of February, drivers had to intervene every 1.3km on average; a week later this improved slightly and an intervention was necessary every 1.6 km. After that it dropped to 1.1 km and now this number has returned to an average of one intervention per 1.3 km. This is apparent from data published by Recode.

The company is making progress on how often drivers had to intervene to prevent accidents. This involved interventions that would otherwise have resulted in collisions with persons or accidents that would have resulted in a loss of at least EUR 4,650. At the beginning of February, such an intervention was required on average every 201 km to prevent these accidents. A week later, this figure deteriorated and interventions had to be taken every 80 km on average. After that, this figure improved again and now it is at 315km.

The data shows that Uber’s 43 self-driving cars in California, Arizona and Pennsylvania drove a total of 32,756km autonomously last week. A week earlier, in the first week of March, this number of kilometers was slightly higher at 35,405. In the first week of February, the cars drove much shorter distances autonomously; the number was then 8207km, but in that week Uber only used 20 self-driving cars.