If you won't publish your intervention data, the fire brigade will publish it for you

Every autonomous system running in the wild today produces a stream of numbers its operator watches obsessively: interventions per thousand miles, remote-assist requests per shift, sorties completed per aircraft, mean time between failures. These figures determine which programmes get funded and which quietly die. They are the true state of the industry.

Almost none of them are published.

What gets published instead is marketing arithmetic. Cities served. Rides given. Stores covered. A drone operator will happily tell you its best customers order three times a week; it will not tell you how many flights per hundred were scrubbed, diverted or hand-flown by a remote pilot. A robotaxi firm will publish a comparative crash-rate study when the numbers flatter it, and go silent on how often a teleoperator had to rescue a stranded vehicle.

The industry's working assumption is that silence is the safe option. The past month in San Francisco demonstrates the opposite.

Because when operators don't publish operational data, someone else does — and that someone has no incentive to be generous. San Francisco's fire department has been logging autonomous vehicle interference since 2022, incident by incident, and those reports are now the evidentiary backbone of a federal warning letter, a proposed act of Congress and a municipal fining ordinance. The industry spent years declining to define its own failure metrics. The fire brigade defined them instead: blocked engines, obstructed station doors, vehicles that had to be driven away by the responders they were impeding.

That is what an information vacuum fills with.

Aviation solved this

The instructive comparison is not tech, it is aviation. Commercial flight did not become the safest way to travel by hiding its incidents; it became safe by institutionalising their disclosure. Confidential, non-punitive reporting systems have existed since the 1970s, built on a bargain: tell us everything that nearly went wrong, and the data will be used to fix systems rather than punish crews. The result is an industry whose failure modes are catalogued, shared and engineered out — and whose social licence is correspondingly enormous.

The autonomy sector is being offered the same bargain and behaving as though it's a trap. It is the reverse. Voluntary, standardised disclosure is the only alternative to disclosure on someone else's terms — a congressman's, a plaintiff's lawyer's, a fire chief's.

What good looks like

The metrics are not mysterious. A serious operator could publish, quarterly: interventions and remote assists per thousand miles or per thousand sorties, categorised by cause; emergency-service interactions and their resolution times; scrub and abort rates; and the boring reliability figures — availability, mean time between failures — that every buyer privately asks for anyway.

Which points at the real lever. Regulation will come, slowly and clumsily. Procurement can come faster. If you are an executive evaluating an autonomy vendor — for your warehouse, your port, your delivery network — the single most revealing question you can ask is: show me your intervention data, and tell me why it isn't public. A vendor confident in its numbers has a competitive weapon. A vendor that won't share them under NDA has answered your question anyway.

The first major operator to publish real operational data will take a short-term bruising from headlines and a long-term lead in trust, regulatory goodwill and enterprise sales. The rest will keep their silence — right up until a firefighter's incident report speaks for them.