@Slowcoach, That's not what the article says, the full section is:
"Drivers of Google’s self-driving car had to intervene 13 times between September 2014 and November 2015 in order to stop the vehicle from crashing.
The figures are revealed in Google Self Driving Car Testing Report which was requested by California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).
The report also shows that during the same time period, Google’s autonomous car recorded 272 disengagements (where the driver was forced to take over following a detection of a failure of the autonomous technology) over a distance of 424,331 miles, an average of once every 1,560 miles."
So they were interventions every 1,560 miles but they would only have crashed once every 32,640 miles. Which may seem high until you look at Google's breakdown of the 13 incidents. 2 of these were where there would have been contact with an traffic cone. In 3 of these instances it was the driver of another vehicle which would have caused the collision, the Google car would simply have failed to avoid being crashed into.
Looking at the monthly breakdown only 5 of the probable contact incidents occurred in 2015 despite almost 90% of the mileage being done. This equates to 74179 miles per avoided crash (including ones which weren't the cars fault).
I don't know the figures but would guess that is better than most humans achieve.
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