California DMV self-driving report: Waymo and GM lead with 63 disengagements over 352K+ miles and 105 disengagements over 131K+ miles, respectively
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second year California's DMV has published per-company disengagement numbers, and the 2018 filing lands on an established baseline: a year earlier, Waymo reported its rate falling from 0.8 to 0.2 disengagements per 1,000 autonomous miles while total miles climbed to 635K (its own year-over-year disclosure). The new figures — 63 disengagements over 352K+ miles for Waymo, 105 over 131K+ for GM — keep that metric as the industry's most-watched public number.
The report also exposes how uneven participation is. Tesla ran just four cars on California roads in late 2017, logging 550 miles at 0.33 disengagements per mile (its first California test fleet) — a rate that reads poorly next to Waymo's even though the sample is tiny.
First-order effects
- Waymo and GM exit the filing cycle with defensible benchmarks — roughly one disengagement per 5,600 and per 1,250 miles respectively — while Tesla's thin 550-mile California footprint makes its 0.33-per-mile rate the outlier of the report.
- The DMV's annual disclosure becomes the de facto scorecard every company testing in California must now plan its PR around, whether or not the miles are comparable.
Second-order effects
- New entrants inherit the same public leaderboard on unfavorable terms: when Apple joined the filing cycle, its 2020 numbers showed a disengagement every 145 miles against Waymo's ~11,017 miles between disengagements (Apple's own DMV filing), turning the report into a credibility gap rather than a progress log.
- Because raw disengagement counts reward volume as much as quality, competitors gain an incentive to argue about definitions — what counts as a disengagement — rather than just accumulate miles.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, supervised test miles stop being the meaningful measure: by 2024 California logged 4.5M autonomous test miles, down 50% year over year, with driverless testing down 83% (the DMV's 2024 tally) — consistent with leaders like Waymo shifting weight to driverless operation, where it runs roughly 200 robotaxis without human monitors.
- Structurally, a state agency's routine filing requirement has become the autonomy sector's de facto ranking mechanism, shaping which companies read as credible to regulators, partners, and cities weighing robotaxi access.
The trend: California's annual disengagement filings turned supervised test miles into the autonomy industry's public leaderboard, even as the leaders' real competition moved to driverless operation beyond the metric's reach.