Uber’s technically inferior self-driving system kills an Arizona Pedestrian

A self-driving car operated by Uber appears to have caused the first known death of a pedestrian struck by an autonomous vehicle on a public road.

Uber has suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

A key metric for measuring the quality of a self-driving system is how long the self-driving car can stay in self-driving mode without human intervention.

In March, 2017, Uber’s performance reported that Uber self-driving cars were able to travel an average of 0.67 miles on Scottsdale Road without human intervention and an average of 2 miles without a ‘bad experience”’.

In 2016, the reported miles before intervention in California were:

Google: 5,127.9 miles (635,868 miles driven, 124 disengagements)
BMW: 638 miles (638 miles driven, 1 disengagements)
Nissan: 263.3 miles (6,056 miles driven, 23 disengagements)
Ford: 196.6 miles (590 miles driven, 3 disengagements)
General Motors: 54.7 miles (8,156 miles driven, 149 disengagements)
Delphi Automotive Systems: 14.9 miles (2,657.7 miles driven, 178 disengagements)
Tesla: 2.9 miles (550 miles, 185 disengagements)
Mercedes-Benz: 2 miles (673 miles, 336 disengagements)
Bosch: 0.68 miles (983 miles driven, 1,448 disengagements)

Uber was down at the bottom for self-driving cars. Uber was over a thousand times worse than Google-Waymo and 100 times worse than several other car makers.

Numbers for 2017 were similar. There were no new disengagement reports from Uber but Uber had ramped up its self-driving car fleet at the end of 2017 and had reported 2 million miles driven by over 200 vehicles. Google had reported reaching 4 million miles driving by self-driving vehicles.

In 2017, Waymo- Google reported 63 disengagements over 352,545 miles of testing, a rate of 1 every 5596 miles. This was 0.18 disengagements per 1000 miles. That shows continued improvement from the company’s 0.2 disengagements per every 1000 miles reported in last year’s disengagement reports and the 0.8 mark established in 2015.

In 2017, Cruise Automation reported 105 disengagements over 131,676 miles, a rate of one disengagement for every 1254 miles logged, or 0.79 disengagement for every 1000 miles traveled. This is the same as the 0.8 rate per 1000 miles that Waymo had two years before in 2015. In the final three months of 2017, Cruise Automation (now owned by GM) logged 62,689 miles and reported 12 disengagements, one every 5224 miles.

Cruise vehicles were involved in 21 of the 27 statewide autonomous-vehicle crashes in 2017.

Uber has stared self-driving cars in self-driving cars San Francisco California, but will not report on the driving results until 2019.

In 2017, one of Uber’s Volvo XC90 sport utility vehicles was hit when the driver of another car failed to yield, causing the Uber vehicle to roll over onto its side. The car was in self-driving mode with a safety driver behind the wheel, but police said the autonomous vehicle had not been at fault.