Only if perfection is defined as "statistically better than humans".
I do agree that these "assistive" technologies have the potential to do more harm than good, but the bar is actually far lower than "perfection".
(Having said that, there's not much doubt in my mind that stuff like antilock brakes and autonomous emergency braking have reduced the road toll (and will reduce it further as these recent-ish technology become more common i the aged vehicle fleet) - I think the difference there is then those technologies are not nearly so inclined to make driver pay less attention to what's going on around them. I _hope_ people don't think "It's OK, I've got emergency braking - I'll just watch this tv show as I drive to work!")
California .92 deaths per 100 million (human)vehicle miles traveled. There were only 500k autonomous miles driven in California last year.
I'd bet your guess about death rate per mile is right considering waymo which has largest and most advanced fleet only drove 2 million miles nationwide last year.
slammed into a parked fire truck going 65 miles per hour
the solid construction of the vehicles may be compensating for shortcomings in the driver assist features.
[1] https://medium.com/waymo/waymo-reaches-5-million-self-driven... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self...
With only one death, the only conclusions you could reasonably reach from statistics are either "we don't know yet" or "we've gone so many miles with only one death that we know it's safe enough." There's no reasonable way to argue from the stats that we know it's not safe.
Personally, I don't think that it's right to dismiss these systems entirely if they provide some level of safety benefit, are cheaper and easier than level 5 autonomous vehicles to develop and / or deploy.
> http://www.iihs.org/iihs/news/desktopnews/stay-within-the-li...
"My car will jump in if I fuck up"(current driver aides) seems a lot different than "I have to jump in if my car fucks up".
> Our car-based transportation system is far and away the most dangerous thing any of us accept doing on a daily basis ... everyone on the jury has in the back of their mind "that could have been me"
> drivers don't get punished for doing something dangerous, ... They get punished for doing something more dangerous than the norm.
> self-driving cars don't just have to be safer than human drivers to be free of liability, they need to be safe period. In a trial, they don't benefit from the default "could have been me" defense.
You are obviously correct that a "statistically better than humans" vehicle is an improvement over what we currently have. But this is the kind of technically correct answer that doesn't actually resonate with people, especially those outside of tech.