Human drivers are pretty terrible. I'd imagine if it breaks down, then the same breakdown cover everyone has at the moment will kick in.
I beg to differ. The average sober human driver has 1 fatal accident in 120-300 million miles traveled, depending on where they live in North America.
Given that we are bags of meat and water, have reaction times measured in hundreds of milliseconds, were never designed to operate heavy machinery, and manage to achieve all that on a mere 100 watts, that's pretty amazing.
What do you consider the threshold for human drivers being good or bad? Even if we could get to 1 death per billion miles (with human drivers), I'd consider that pretty bad.
Regardless, if an autonomous driving system can do better, that's all that really matters. We're not there yet, but it's not inconceivable that we could be before too long.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
Also, ~40% of driving deaths (Again, with significant regional variation) are due to alcohol use.
I'd consider 1 death per billion miles pretty good. That's one fatal mistake in 25 million hours of driving. That's a lot of hours.
> Regardless, if an autonomous driving system can do better, that's all that really matters. We're not there yet, but it's not inconceivable that we could be before too long.
Agreed.
- hard to draft paying & passive customers in to accident mitigation or resolution role.