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.