Hacker News Reader

In the last 8 months: - Number of human-driving auto accidents in US: ~10.6 mil - Number of self-driving auto accidents in US: 4 Guess which one merited an article? --- Editing to add that all 4 crashes were apparently caused by human drivers https://twitter.com/msquinn/status/597738756511277056

View on HN

There are 255m cars in the US (1). 10.6m accidents represents 0.04 accidents per car.

4 out of 48 self driving cars in California have been involved in accidents which is 0.8 accidents per car.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...

I think you also need to consider the number of regular cars vs the number of self driving cars.

Yeah, rates are important, but also small sample size (and who's at fault matters - the companies claim that human drivers caused all 4).

So you're not wrong, but my point is that humans are awful drivers, prone to distraction and fatal crashes. (32,719 in 2013 alone). If anything else (terrorists, sharks, aliens) were causing 30k deaths a year, we'd wouldn't be blithely accepting it as the status quo and acting fearful of measures that could dramatically ameliorate the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com