Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving. We should want systems with redundancy and using multiple modalities so that a car crash isn’t an accident, it’s a choice.
Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are.
For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1]
More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there.
Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.
My high school English teacher father used to ironically remark about how students who failed his class repeatedly (often for all four years) somehow always managed to pass the drivers license test. Funny that.
Your calculation also neglects the cost of auto accidents in terms of wasted life. There will be an accident on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles every single day--generally multiple. When that happens, an enormous number of people wind up sitting in their cars for an extended period of time. That accident may not have actively killed someone, but it caused many thousands of people to waste an hour+ of their life. If a thousand people waste an hour every day, that's one "dead" year of human life every 9 days. And that multiplies across the entire city and then across every city. The cost of automotive fender benders and the time they waste exceeds the "death toll" of driving by quite a lot.
Humans suck at driving. It's a boring, repetitive task with sudden moments of sheer terror. As long as everything goes "normally", it's okay. When something unusual happens when driving, most outcomes are random. The lack of deaths and injuries due to driving is more due to automotive, traffic and safety engineering than it is due to active crisis decision making by human drivers.
I disagree that humans are bad at driving.
Let me ask you this, how many miles would a fully autonomous self-driving car need to drive without a fatality for you to be able to reasonably claim that it's statistically a better driver than a human?
And feel free just to round to an order of magnitude here. 2.75 x 10^z <-- what is `z` here?
In 2013 in the US there were 32,719 crash related fatalities and 2.3 million reported injuries. So that must mean humans are bad a driving right? Well those numbers are tiny compared to the 3 trillion miles that humans drove that year.
Humans have about 1.09 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. The probability of a human causing a fatality for a mile driven is low: 0.00000109%
To show to a 95% confidence interval that a self-driving car is better at driving than a human it would need to drive 275 million miles flawlessly. This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles driving continuously for almost 13 years.
Some people can flawlessly do stunts with their car after driving for a few years and have a perfect driving record
Others make you shake in fear every time you sit with them as you see them fail to notice other cars when they change lanes, despite driving for 10 years
It’s a bell curve and I think the median is better than current car driving AI, even with LIDAR, can achieve
But combo AI (or just safety features) with humans and I think it shifts the bell curve up a lot
You can’t change your genetics, you can’t necessarily change where you live, and you can’t just fix transit without rebuilding an entire city that took 100+ years to build so the standards are just what they have to be
Over the last many decades, we’ve starting requiring things like backup cameras because cars naturally break down and so it’s something we can actually change on a short timescale (but it does add a lot of cost)
Fixing transit is a long timescale thing
I still remember the time my mom almost drove into a tram tunnel! She wasn't used to the city.
To quote:
> Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries.
> Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use.
E.g. keeping track of near misses / interventions can get you data points much more quickly.