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Comment by xbeta | Hacker News Reader

Statistically speaking, I am curious to know the data on these areas: - number of miles driven per fatal accident on self-driving - number of miles driven per fatal accident on a human driver.

It is important to know whether our machine is now doing worse/better than our counter-part and this means a lot for our self-driving initiatives.

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1.15 per hundred million vehicle miles traveled by humans [1]. Uber only reached a million miles in September, with Waymo a little ahead at four million [2].

Note that this is far too little data from which to draw any conclusions, since the sample size for fatalities involving self driving cars is one and the number of miles driven is many orders of magnitude less.

[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709104/waymo-self-driv...

The numbers that I have seen indicate that humans have a fatal accident roughly once per hundred million miles, while we have one fatal accident for a self-driving car, with somewhere around ten million miles driven across all self-driving cars.

I've heard Uber is around 3 million self-driving miles.

So Uber would be 30x worse than humans.

Interesting analysis, but the data seems a little sparse to draw this conclusion.

Good to know! But I am more curious for the data cover every self-driving vehicles, not just about Uber. It could be Uber is doing worse, but my ask is whether we (as an industry) is still on a right direction for this "bold bet".

We also don't know how many fatal crashes were avoided due to human intervention (Uber has people inside the cars). It is almost certainly a whole lot worse than 30x at this stage.

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