That said, what's the likely accident rate for a 95th percentile human, starting in a parked car, hitting another stationary vehicle parked directly in front of them? There must be a few "accidentally put it in drive instead of reverse" type incidents but I'd except it to be exceedingly rare.
It's a pretty rare incidence given good conditions and a competent driver. Add a driver impairment, fog, etc and it becomes more plausible. It's all heresay until we look at some insurance claim data, though.
The pool has now installed steel bollards in front of each parking spot, by the way.
Second, "at least as good as the average human" is a bad benchmark. Not because an average human is so bad at driving, but because people make high-level judgements about acceptable risks. For example, you are much, much less likely to dent your bosses Porch than some random car. AI is equally likely to hit either.
Statistics are always difficult and hard to translate to conclusions, but in the case of autonomous cars it seems like advocates really willing to bend them to the extreme to make a point about how autonomous cars will be safer than humans, even though it's impossible to say anything sensible about that except that 'the average driver' as a goal for safety seems like a very bad target to aim at.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/04/car-makers-cant-drive-th...
That's a good point. It makes sense that the standard we want self-driving cars to achieve is the crash rate on average driving conditions, not the average driving crash rate. The latter is lowered by drunk driving, drugged driving, joyriding and other willfull neglect.
If it's available to a regular consumer (as opposed to, say, a test driver), it's deployed and will be used.