35k die per year in the US alone. Worldwide it's more like 1.25 million. http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_number/en/ http://www.who

35k die per year in the US alone. Worldwide it's more like 1.25 million. http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_number/en/ http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_... You don't need autocars to be 1000 times better than humans. You just need them to be equally good as the average driver ALL THE TIME, such that they're never distracted, sleepy, driving unlawfully, etc. The occasional lapse in driver competence is the cause for the vast majority of crashes. I suspect the limitations of driver (or autocar) perception plays a small role in most accidents when compared to lapses. As residents of a developed country, with a very low death rate per mile driven, we also see traffic risks very differently than the world's norm. The annual death rate per 100k motor vehicles in the US is 13; in India it's 130 in Africa it's 574. In the more unsafe countries, I suspect driver error is the cause of 99% of accidents. Replacing human driver decisions with autocars would reduce worldwide driver fatality risk enormously, reducing perhaps 90% of global traffic fatalities -- about one million people a year.