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To really be a measurable improvement over humans, and especially an improvement that is statistically distinguishable from just letting the safety tech of 2019

To really be a measurable improvement over humans, and especially an improvement that is statistically distinguishable from just letting the safety tech of 2019 percolate into the average car, self-driving needs to achieve fatality rates around 0.1 per billion miles. Current averages for the US are around 10 per billion miles and decreasing; best countries in Europe are already below 5 per billion miles. There's some really interesting progress both on vehicles monitoring driver attention, and on monitoring for alcohol in the air, that would yield substantial improvements even beyond 2019 tech. I have no doubt we'll see fatality rates below 1 per billion miles in Western Europe within a decade. The corollary of the statistics quoted above is that you need to observe your self-driving vehicle system over tens of billions of miles before you even know if you're safer or not.

tim333 7y ago
I'd quibble with your stats that self driving has to be 100x better than human to be a measurable improvement. You can estimate fairly well if a human driver is safe or not from a few hours as a passenger by seeing if they notice everything and if they have near misses. Also it's not to hard on published data to see the Tesla autopilot seems a fair bit worse than humans under the same conditions. I imagine they will improve.
- semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  I'm not saying it has to be 100x better than a human. What I'm saying is, the averages today are across all vehicles on the road, some of which are old and have fairly low survival probability in an accident. And the deployment of technology to handle/avoid distracted driving is still in its infancy. If we just wait 10-15 years, I believe the safety rates for humans will increase by 10x over current US statistics. Then self-driving has to manage another 10x improvement over that, in order to be worth it.

tim333 7y ago

I'd quibble with your stats that self driving has to be 100x better than human to be a measurable improvement. You can estimate fairly well if a human driver is safe or not from a few hours as a passenger by seeing if they notice everything and if they have near misses. Also it's not to hard on published data to see the Tesla autopilot seems a fair bit worse than humans under the same conditions. I imagine they will improve.

semi-extrinsic 7y ago
I'm not saying it has to be 100x better than a human. What I'm saying is, the averages today are across all vehicles on the road, some of which are old and have fairly low survival probability in an accident. And the deployment of technology to handle/avoid distracted driving is still in its infancy. If we just wait 10-15 years, I believe the safety rates for humans will increase by 10x over current US statistics. Then self-driving has to manage another 10x improvement over that, in order to be worth it.