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Comment by raphaelj | Hacker News Reader

To put this accident in perspective, Uber self-driving cars totaled about 2 to 3 millions miles, while the fatality rate on US roads is approximately 1.18 deaths per 100 millions miles [1].

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat...

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The appropriate comparison would be to ask how many pedestrians were struck by a car and killed.

Considering that humans would likely slow down if they see a pedestrian - even if one appeared suddenly - this is even more disconcerting.

It's more specific, but I care about all fatalities, not just car-pedestrian fatalities.

At some point, autonomous vehicles will be carrying cargo instead of passengers. When that happens, fatalities per mile driven will no longer be a valid comparison between manned and unmanned vehicles, as catastrophic accidents will have fewer people involved.

You can still tally fatalities per million ton miles of cargo. As I'm sure people do already for trucks vs trains etc.

I do think it'll always be fair to consider total lives lost per usage metric, regardless of if people were in the vehicle or not. The lives of drivers & passengers have equal value to the lives of pedestrians.

This Rand study looks at impact of lives saved and recommends that "Results Suggest That More Lives Will Be Saved the Sooner HAVs Are Deployed". Any mishap, while most unfortunate and tragic for everyone concerned, should not result in kneejerk reactions!

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2150.html

That’s not apples to apples. How many cars account for the nhtsa number and how many for Uber’s program?

I'd say that miles driven is a good normalizer.

In fact, NHTSA statistics includes miles driven under adverse conditions (rain, snow, etc) while I'd bet that this is not the case for Uber.

Statistically, I don't think that miles driven on lonely freeways equal those in Manhatten. And perceptually, running down city pedestrians at 40 MPH will impact public thinking more than highway fatalities.

True.

Knowing that makes this much more infuriating.

Waymo has driven 2.7 billion miles in simulation [1]. Is that enough to give them some idea of how many deaths to expect?

[1] https://waymo.com/ontheroad/

It's impossible to know. The simulation needs to be very good with thousands and thousands of all the weird situations that can occur in the real world. Without knowing how sofisticated the simulation is and if they also are using generative algorithms to try to break the autonomous system you can't even ballpark it.

that doesn't sound like a fair comparison. How many human interventions were there in the 2-3 million Uber miles?

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