>Arguably, you could be super dishonest and handle every single intersection manually, and still have a massive miles driven statistic since most distance is accumulated on straight-ways.

i'm not sure what benefit there would be to gaming the disengagement stats. If anything, i think the incentive would be the other way around - inflate your number of disengagements so your competition thinks you're further behind than you actually are.

The point of testing is to bring a product to market, and if your product sucks people are going to figure that out relatively quickly. hiding your disengagements from the california DMV isn't going to do anything for you except build hype your product can't live up to.