The Deadly Myth That Human Error Causes Most Car Crashes

Chris Urmson in his Recode Decode interview – “Well, it’s not even that they grab for it, it’s that they experience it for a while and it works, right? And maybe it works perfectly every day for a month. The next day it may not work, but their experience now is, “Oh this works,” and so they’re not prepared to take over and so their ability to kind of save it and monitor it decays with time. So you know in America, somebody dies in a car accident about 1.15 times per 100 million miles. That’s like 10,000 years of an average person’s driving. So, let’s say the technology is pretty good but not that good. You know, someone dies once every 50 million miles. We’re going to have twice as many accidents and fatalities on the roads on average, but for any one individual they could go a lifetime, many lifetimes before they ever see that.” – https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-dri... or Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair – “Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair says you get to 90 percent automation pretty quickly once you understand the technology you need. “It takes a lot, lot longer to get to 96 or 97,” he says. “You have a curve, and those last few percentage points are really difficult.” Almost every time auto executives talk about the promise of self-driving cars, they cite the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistic that shows human error is the “critical reason” for all but 6 percent of car crashes. But that’s kind of misleading, says Nair. “If you look at it in terms of fatal accidents and miles driven, humans are actually very reliable machines. We need to create an even more reliable machine.” – https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driv... or prof. Raj Rajkumar head of Carnegie Mellon University’s leading self-driving laboratory. – “if you do the mileage statistics, one fatality happens every 80 million miles. That is unfortunately of course, but that is a tremendously high bar for automatically vehicle to meet.” min.19.30 of this podcast interview – http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then/2018/05/self_...