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Data that Google submitted recently to the California Department of Motor Vehicles shows that during road tests over a 14-month period, the company's autonomous cars had to hand over control to a human driver on 272 occasions because of potential safety issues.
In addition, a human driver had to disengage autonomous control on 69 other occasions to ensure safe operation of the vehicle, the report noted. In 13 of these instances, the vehicle would have potentially made "contact" with another object if the human driver had not assumed control of the autonomous vehicle, Google said.

Google classifies autonomous vehicle disengagements into two categories. The first is what the company called "immediate manual control" disengagements, when the software detects a failure or potential failure in the autonomous technology, like a broken wire, a communication glitch or sensor reading anomaly. In these instances, the car automatically turns control over to the human driver.

The second category of disengagement in Google's book is when the driver proactively takes manual control of the vehicle because of doubts over its ability to safely navigate a particular situation in autonomous mode.