- Companies working on self-driving cars are required to give the state of California regular reports on how many miles they drove and how many disengagements from autonomous mode there were (number of times a human intervened).
- Tesla reported, for 2019, only one autonomous drive in the state, of a mere 12.2 miles, and no disengagements. For comparison, Waymo reported nearly 1.5 million miles and Cruise claimed more than 830,000 for 2019, according to Forbes.
- That's interesting since CEO Elon Musk has said he has used Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD) during the past year.
Every year companies working on autonomous cars in California have to file a report to the state, stating the number of miles they traveled during their drives and their disengagements (how many times the human behind the wheel had to take over). Recently, companies including Waymo and Cruise have balked about the disengagement data point, saying it doesn’t reflect the true power of their systems. Frankly, miles aren't much of an indicator, either, since these drives take place in only certain areas.
The usefulness of these reports aside, one bit of data that was discovered during 2019's disclosure was Tesla's report of only a single autonomous drive of exactly 12.2 miles around its Palo Alto headquarters. According to Tesla, there were zero disengagements during the drive and it was meant as a demo of its system. The video (above) of the drive was published back in April 2019.
What's weird is that CEO Elon Musk has stated on a few occasions that he has used the company's FSD (Full Self Driving) mode in vehicles. There are no public details about these drives, and Tesla has pushed back the launch of FSD to customers multiple times.
With the company being so bullish about its vehicles' upcoming self-driving capabilities, it’s weird that it has only done one official test and that test was captured on video. Either they are testing these capabilities elsewhere or these tests are being done on the down-low.