Uber's self-driving cars have trouble going a mile without human intervention, leaks show

Uber wants to take us to a future where self-driving cars are ubiquitous and human drivers are irrelevant. However, if newly leaked documents are correct, the company's autonomous vehicles struggle to take anyone even a single mile without human intervention.

That's right, the safety drivers overseeing the autonomous cars allegedly had to seize control of the vehicles on average once every .8 miles, according to internal documents obtained by Recode. That stat specifically applies to the week that ended on March 8, 2017, and covers 43 active cars.

Was it just a bad week for the ride-hail giant? Nope. The same documents show that toward the end of January flesh-and-blood drivers took control on average every .9 miles — hitting the once-per-mile mark in February before slipping back down.

This is not the first hint of technical difficulty to come out of Uber's controversial car program. When it first launched in San Francisco this past December, a car was filmed running a red light. Uber quickly blamed the error on the human driver, but The New York Times reported later that (surprise!) the technology was actually to blame. Uber later stopped testing in California after a run-in with the state's DMV, although it got the OK to bring the program back to its home turf last week. Uber has also tested autonomous cars in Pennsylvania and Arizona.

SEE ALSO: Uber's Travis Kalanick: Yep, I'm a jerk, basically

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Importantly, that .8 mile statistic covers every time drivers had to disengage the autonomous system except in cases of "accidental disengagements, end-of-route disengagements, and early takeovers.”

So while not everything was a near crash that almost took out grandma, the .8 number does allegedly represent humans needing to take over to avoid some sort of unpleasant outcome. Thankfully, the data is a bit more granular, and Recode reports that last week humans were required to perform "critical" interventions — to avoid striking a person or knocking up around $5,000 or more in property damage — once every 200 miles.

Still though. Uber clearly has a long way to go before its autonomous cars can safely drive people around. Maybe its engineers should just focus on flying cars instead.