As of late 2017, Waymo/Google reported having driven a total of 4 million miles on roads. Given that Waymo is one of the biggest players, it's hard to see how all of autonomous cars have driven 100 million miles at this point.
Nevermind that the initial rollouts almost always involve locales in which driving conditions are relatively safe (e.g. nice weather and infrastructure). Nevermind that the vast majority of autonomous testing so far has involved the presence of a human driver, and that there have been hundreds of disengagements:
Humans may be terrible at driving, but the stats are far from being in favor of autonomous vehicles. Which is to be expected given the early stage of the tech.
My point is that "the stats" don't exist if you're only looking at one autonomous car accident without comparing it to the relevant statistics from human accidents.
If the stats don't exist then what was your whole basis for making an argument? On what grounds do you have to argue that we shouldn't be pessimistic about the state of autonomous driving? That you pulled out the IIHS stats without apparently bothering to look up the number of reported self-driving miles driven seems to suggest that you assumed that the fatality rate was obviously skewed against human driving.
That's fine, we don't have to consider just fatal accidents:
> One result of the sharp increase in GM’s number of miles driven is a plethora of accidents. The auto giant’s autonomous cars were involved in 22 fender benders over the course of the reporting period (and two more in 2018). That’s one crash for every 5,985 miles of testing.
> On what grounds do you have to argue that we shouldn't be pessimistic about the state of autonomous driving?
I didn't say that.
I'm not saying autonomous cars are safer, I'm saying that this accident doesn't prove autonomous cars are less safe.
> That you pulled out the IIHS stats without apparently bothering to look up the number of reported self-driving miles driven seems to suggest that you assumed that the fatality rate was obviously skewed against human driving.
I brought up the IIHS stats to show that merely reporting an accident in isolation from a full statistical model doesn't prove anything.
OK. And the person you responded to with the fatality stats said nothing about proving which way either:
> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when someone walks out into the road. Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/27/waymo-racks-up-4-million-s...
Nevermind that the initial rollouts almost always involve locales in which driving conditions are relatively safe (e.g. nice weather and infrastructure). Nevermind that the vast majority of autonomous testing so far has involved the presence of a human driver, and that there have been hundreds of disengagements:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s...
Humans may be terrible at driving, but the stats are far from being in favor of autonomous vehicles. Which is to be expected given the early stage of the tech.