2020 has been earmarked as the year when autonomous cars may finally make it to the roads. But just four years to go, are we really sure that these cars are safe enough to be allowed to run on our roads along with other vehicles?

Based on data received from Google’s Self Driving Car Centre in Atwater, California, one can have some idea as to how things would look once these self-driving cars make an entry on to real roads. If one delves deep into these test drives then one comes to know that Google now has a fleet of 53 cars operating day and night, and they have logged 1.3 million miles of autonomous driving. Google is required by California state law to report “disengagements”—that is, times when either the computer has handed control of the car back to the driver, or the driver has taken over on his own.

Though the cars have clocked appreciable number of miles the reporting process of the so called ‘disengagements’ isn’t entirely clear. This data is dicey because disengagements can happen anytime a car encounters something as simple as a piece of wood in the road and has to be steered around it.

It suggests they happen several times per trip. What amazes all is the fact that from the end of 2014 through the entire 2015, Google has reported just 341 disengagements. Probably Google felt that it didn’t have to report incidents that the car could have handled on its own.

Some of the data obtained also shows that the cars are getting better at driving on their own as the average distance between computer-initiated disengagements has gone down over time. In addition to this, the data reveals that the trained drivers stepped in on average within 0.84 seconds of the computer signalling it was turning control over to a human.

Though all these seem very encouraging as far as the progress of autonomous cars is concerned, the problem lies in the handoff between human and computer control because trained drivers like the ones Google employs may react quickly when the system needs help, but the research suggests that regular driversare likely to zone out. That is they may not react exactly as one is expected to react in situations of changing controls. All in all, there is still a lot to be done to make these autonomous cars safe for the person travelling in it and travelling along with it on the roads.

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Author: Technology Blog