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Comment by davidgay | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven.

So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.

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Sir this is a Wendy's, I mean a discussion about autonomous vehicles. The benchmark for the autonomous vehicles in the USA is in comparison to humans in the USA. That means autonomous vehicles need to go ~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes to equal the mean driver. The mean US driver is a very high bar to reach for technology, that is why Waymo has just maybe barely reached that bar after nearly two decades and billions of dollars.

> "~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes"

That's between fatalities, not between crashes. The reported injury rate is 62 times higher than the fatality rate, and the overall police-reported crash rate is 170 times higher than the fatal crash rate.

You are correct, I missed the adjective on my second use. As my points were exclusively about fatal crashes and I never mentioned the injury or crash rate at any point and previously used 5,500 years exclusively in relation to fatal crashes, it should be obvious that I intended to mean that and my point still stands with that correction.

My primary concern is with your treatment of "unsafe" as meaning nothing less than "dead".

A lot of that isn't the drivers; it's the roads being designed for speed and traffic volume ahead of safety.

80% of the data (for fatalities per km) in that table is missing

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