Google cars "getting better at driving themselves"

California's Department of Motor Vehicles has released it report into autonomous vehicle disengagement  which summaries disclosures from all companies working on self-driving cars in the state, and it shows that Google's car company Waymo is reporting a huge drop, despite a rise in miles driven.

The statistics say its rate of safety-related disengages has fallen from 0.8 per thousand miles to 0.2 per thousand miles in 2016, while Waymo increased its driving by 50 percent in the state ' totalling of 635,868 miles.

The company's total number of reportable disengages fell from 341 in 2015 to 124.

Website The Verge quotes a blog post by Dmitri Dolgov, head of self-driving technology for Waymo saying, 'This four-fold improvement reflects the significant work we've been doing to make our software and hardware more capable and mature. And because we're creating a self-driving car that can take you from door to door, almost all our time has been spent on complex urban or suburban streets.  This has given us valuable experience sharing the road safely with pedestrians and cyclists, and practicing advanced maneuvers such as making unprotected left turns and traversing multi-lane intersections.'