5x safer isn't an unreasonable threshold to ask for. All life-critical, engineered systems incorporate a safety margin. To win buy-in from the population at l

5x safer isn't an unreasonable threshold to ask for. All life-critical, engineered systems incorporate a safety margin. To win buy-in from the population at large, you sure as heck better have overwhelming statistics. Marginal just won't cut it. When you're talking about taking control away from the driver, all you need is one accident a human would have prevented to create political backlash and deteriorate trust in the system. Just because several other unvoiced lives may have been saved doesn't offer consolation to the victims or deem the loss acceptable. I think of it as analogous to the legal doctrine that convicting one innocent is worse than letting 10 guilty individuals go free. I'm always skeptical when developers claim a computer can do a better job than a human, as I've encountered so many edge cases the programming just never adequately accounted for. It will take time and a great deal of experience running these platforms in the wild until they become truly resilient. I would be quite pissed off to find the severed limb I suffered in a crash was due to programming not sufficiently distinguishing e.g. road paint from water streaks. And the metric you choose to define "safer" will never be perfect. Extra buffer helps offset any bias or gaps in your methodology and capture more of the long tail of "one-offs" never accounted for in version 1. I'm a big believer that driverless vehicles will provide huge improvements to our quality of life, I just feel there's a lot of misrepresentation taking place out there today as to how far along these systems are.