Over 424,000 miles driven:
272 times the car had a 'system failure' and immediately returned control to the driver with only a couple seconds of warning. (Approx. every 1,558 miles.) A car mid-traffic spontaneously dropping control of the vehicle would likely create a large number of accidents.
13 car accidents prevented via human intervention (Approx. every 32,615 miles), 10 of which would've been the self-driving car's at-fault (Approx. every 42,400 miles). These virtual accidents were tested with the telemetry recorded during the incident, and it was determined had the human test driver not intervened, an accident would've occurred.
Total of these events is 285, which is approximately every 1,487 miles driven.
For useful comparison, a rough human average (when you add a large margin to account for unreported accidents) is somewhere around one accident every 150,000 miles driven. (Insurance companies see them every 250,000 miles approximately, I believe.)
"Our test drivers are trained and prepared for these events and the average driver response time of all measurable events was 0.84 seconds."
Secondly, you fail to mention:
"“Immediate manual control” disengage thresholds are set conservatively. Our objective is not to minimize disengages; rather, it is to gather as much data as possible to enable us to improve our self-driving system."
Thirdly, you fail to mention that the rate has dropped significantly:
"The rate of this type of disengagement has dropped significantly from 785 miles per disengagement in the fourth quarter of 2014 to 5318 miles per disengagement in the fourth quarter of 2015. "
On the contact events, you fail to mention:
"From April 2015 to November 2015, our cars self-drove more than 230,000 miles without a single such event."
Lastly, your comparison with human drivers fails to take into account the environment:
"The setting in which our SDCs and our drivers operate most frequently is important. Mastering autonomous driving on city streets -- rather than freeways, interstates or highways -- requires us to navigate complex road environments such as multi-lane intersections or unprotected left-hand turns, a larger variety of road users including cyclists and pedestrians, and more unpredictable behavior from other road users. This differs from the driving undertaken by an average American driver who will spend a larger proportion of their driving miles on less complex roads such as freeways. Not surprisingly, 89 percent of our reportable disengagements have occurred in this complex street environment"
I don't think self-driving cars are quite ready yet, but you are not representing the state of the art accurately by making out it is as bad as you say.
