It's still flawed atm, but surely it will continue to improve. Not to mention that the average human is already terrible a driver, and replacing them with autodriving surely nets more benefits than the flaws of autodriving - if not at this moment, then very soon in the future.
So even though we rationally should immediately go all in on automation as soon as self-driving cars are on average safer than human ones, realistically this is politically completely unpalatable until they reach a much, much higher, possibly unachievable, standard.
It's not "fair" that this is the case, but unfortunately humans are really bad at accurately assessing the risks of low probability incidents (eg. dying from terrorism), especially if they get a lot of media airtime.
What's the consequence in an autonomous vehicle? Does only _that_ vehicle lose its license? Does every vehicle with that particular revision of the ML model? The whole fleet?
The next problem is, you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human; it may have more information, may be faster in its response time, but maybe in a chaotic environment, that doesn't translate into drastically improved safety. Unless of course, _everything_ on the road is self-driving (meaning, zero pedestrians, zero other vehicles, no animals,...) which is going to run into chicken-egg...
i think this is already proven true empiracally with the existing milage and rates of accidents. https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-l... (or from here https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-..., which quotes various sources of data, unless tesla is lying about their FSD data they reported).
Humans just don't believe in autodriving, and there's still the problem of liability assignment - both aren't a technology problem imho, but a human impediment to adoption.
To show that autonomous cars are better drivers than humans you need data from autonomous cars in the same situation as human drivers. And that data doesn’t exist (yet), because truly autonomous cars don’t drive in all places and situations where humans do.
Are you even making a statistically significant comparison at this point?
And there are these also: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblo...
Quite apart from the fact that this isn't actual self-driving that's being measured (as sibling points out).
It is exactly fair - if a drunk guy in Australia is driving one car. If he hits a child, that has no relevance to my life in EU. He will be arrested and dealt with.
But Tesla autopilot drives millions if cars. It if hits a child in Australia, it does not get arrested. Its also gonna drive over my children in EU.
a false equivalency.
The same type of bozo that reverses into a child also exists in europe.
If autopilot has error in the code that makes it drive off cliffs, that affects made pople.
Pretty much all those optimistic estimates were done by highly untrustworthy companies and in highly artificial conditions.