Did Baidu really do better than Google’s Waymo in California’s self-driving report?

Chinese self-driving pioneer has a lower disengagement rate than the Google spinoff, but experts say the numbers don’t mean much

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Baidu launched its robotaxi services in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, with a fleet of 45 cars on September 26, 2019. (Picture: Baidu)

Published: 5:00am, 29 Feb 2020Updated: 5:42am, 29 Feb 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Last year in California, safety drivers in Waymo’s autonomous vehicles took over the wheel once every 13,000 miles. Baidu, on the other hand, recorded human intervention in its autonomous cars only once every 18,000 miles. That’s according to annual figures the companies submitted to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.

In China, some media outlets were quick to latch on to the apparent triumph. Baidu, the country’s self-driving pioneer, has long been seen as lagging behind Waymo – the Google spinoff that’s often considered a global leader in autonomous driving. The disengagement rate is “one of the best measurements of how advanced a company’s self-driving program is,” claimed one Chinese news site.

But industry experts say it’s not.

“The disengagement metric is essentially worthless and does not really tell anything about the performance of an automated driving system,” Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at consultancy Navigant, told us. “While Baidu's results are indeed impressive this year, they really don't mean very much.”

For one, there is no standard for when a driver should disengage: Each company is free to decide on its own. The rate of disengagement also depends largely on where the vehicle was travelling.

“If the company does a lot of testing in areas with little traffic or other obstacles, there may be fewer disengagements than a company testing in a dense urban environment like San Francisco,” Abuelsamid explained.