Baidu’s self-driving cars require more human intervention than Alphabet’s Waymo

Baidu, which has ambitions to build an operating system for autonomous cars, requires more human intervention during road tests in the US compared with Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet. 

Beijing-based Baidu, which operates China’s largest internet search service, reported to California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) that its self-driving cars had “disengaged” from autonomous control every 41 miles (65.9 kilometres), compared with every 5,596 miles for Waymo.

The term disengaged refers to human drivers taking over from a car’s self-driving system or when that autonomous control itself fails.

Baidu, which received a permit to test its autonomous cars in California’s public roads in 2016, reported that its vehicles had 48 “disengagements” between October 2016 and November 2017 after driving a total of 1,971.7 miles.

Waymo’s self-driving cars recorded 65 disengagements between December 2016 and November 2017, when these logged a total of 352,544.6 miles.

The details of those disengagements, which were released last week by California’s DMV, formed part of the supplemental documents requested by the authority from eight companies, including Baidu, Waymo and Nissan Motor.