Essay On Vehicle Disengagements

Through all of the advancements of the autonomous technology, risks have been proven to be a common factor within the vehicles. The risks involved while the car is in autopilot is disengagement, reaction time, and accident prevention. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) requires an annual report on autonomous vehicle disengagements and accidents in order to issue a permit and monitor the testing of the vehicle (Dixit 2). Disengagement is a risk because in the automated vehicles it requires the driver to be alert ad capable of taking control of the vehicle at all times. The disengagements in vehicles are classified into categories, automatic and manual. Automatic disengagement is when the vehicle's systems recognize a problem and to ensure safety, it makes the driver get themselves through it (Dixit 2). Manual disengagement usually happens when the driver
The average disengagement for Google’s cars are 1.1 disengagements per 1000 mile driven but has recently lowered its disengagement to .18 per every 1000 miles driven (Dixit 3). Once the vehicle is disengaged, the driver of the vehicle needs to be able to take control of it in a timely manner. The average reaction time for a Google vehicle driver is .83 seconds (Dixit 10). Understanding that helps the next component of autonomous driving which is accident avoidance. The California DMV has found that the amount of accidents is in relation with the autonomous miles driven. Google’s data released to the DMV showed that one crash was to happen about every 47,148 miles driven by its cars (Dixit 8). The authors of the journal “Autonomous Vehicle: Disengagements, Accidents and Reaction Time” said in their conclusion that, “[...] This information could help develop safety performance functions for autonomous driving [...]” (Dixit 13). All of the information that of the DMV is getting is causing the autonomous vehicle company to create more advanced technology for their vehicles to fix