Waymo and Cruise are the autonomous car companies that have traveled the most miles in 2020 in California

The state of California requires companies that test their autonomous cars to carry out an Annual Report of the miles they have traveled, of the “disengagements” that their cars have had (disengagement is when the autonomous car remains “ stopped ”and the driver must do something to get out of this critical situation), etc….

I suppose that companies do not like to provide that information very much, but it is very useful for citizens, because that way they know what is happening in this field, which is so interesting for the future.

These cars in tests work alone but have a driver who can assist if there is any incident (disengagement) during the journey.

I suppose that due to the pandemic, they were travelled 800,000 fewer miles in 2020 than in 2019, and most of them were done by Waymo and Cruise cars.

Thus, 2 million miles were traveled in California in total, and 70% of them (1,400,000 miles) were made by Waymo and Cruise cars.

A Chinese company made 200,000, another from Amazon about 100,000, and Apple only traveled 18,000 miles.

They are very clear data of those who are ahead in the reality of the autonomous car.

Something also very important is to know the number of disconnections that occur with respect to the number of miles traveled; and here also Waymo and Cruise stand out.

Waymo had 21 disengagements in 700,000 miles traveled, which is 0.0033 per 1,000 miles, significantly improving its 2019 data.

Cruise had 26 disengagements with a few more miles traveled, so the ratio is similar to Waymo’s, also improving its data from the previous year.

Both companies are far ahead of the rest in terms of their results, as Apple had 130 disconnections with only 18,000 miles traveled.

I think it is very important that this type of information is known, in order to place each one in the right place in the race for the autonomous car.

The fully autonomous car is many years away from being a reality on the roads, but it is close enough for us to begin to be able to see it in cities.

In fact, they are already being tested in a few cities in the USA, China, etc… offering driverless taxi services.

The taxi “business” is going to get more difficult every day. Like so many others.