UPDATED 20:59 EDT / FEBRUARY 13 2019

EMERGING TECH

Apple ranks last out of 48 companies for self-driving car safety in California

Apple Inc. may be famed for many innovations and occasionally cutting-edge technology, but self-driving cars is not one of them, according to a filing the company made with the State of California.

Detailed in a release from California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, Apple’s autonomous vehicles ranked poorly in terms of safety, requiring human intervention nearly every mile driven. More precisely, the cars required 871.65 disengagements for every 1,000 miles driven.

By comparison, Waymo LLC, the company formerly known as Google’s self-driving car project, had 0.09 disengagements per 1000 miles, or 11,154.3 miles per disengagement. Cruise LLC, the autonomous vehicle arm of General Motors Co., had a disengagement every 5,205 miles on average.

Embarrassingly for the company Steve Jobs built, Apple ranked as the worst company testing self-driving in total out of 48 companies that were required to report data, according to The Last Driver License Holder.

Apple attempted to spin the numbers, saying that their disengagements had been “conservative” and that its report was “over-inclusive.” Reuters reported that Apple claims to have “changed how it categorized disengagements starting in July 2018.”

Apple’s attempts to develop self-driving cars have long been troubled. In 2016, the company purged hundreds of jobs from “Project Titan,” the name given to its autonomous vehicle technology project. The cuts were claimed to be the result of Apple pursuing self-driving technology that can be applied to other cars as opposed to developing its own so-called “Apple car.”

Fast-forward to Jan. 24 this year, and 200-plus more staffers were cut as part of an anticipated restructuring initiated by the group’s recently reshuffled leadership. Former Tesla Inc. Vice President of Engineering Doug Field joined Apple late last year along with other Tesla veterans to work on Project Titan.

Lacking from the report were a number of prominent companies in the autonomous vehicle space, specifically Ford Motor Co., Tesla Inc. and Lyft Inc., which are undertaking testing in states other than California. Uber Technologies Inc. was also absent from the report after the company decided not to renew its testing license following a fatal accident in Texas in 2017.

Image: automobileitalia/Flickr

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