alt Hacker News> to reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles
They need to be around parity. So a death every 100mm miles or so. The number of folks who want radically more safety are about balanced by those who want a product in market quicker.
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About half of road deaths involve drivers who are drunk or high. But only a very small fraction of drivers drive drunk or high - 50% of deaths are caused by 2% of drivers.
A self-driving car that merely achieves parity would be worse than 98% of the population.
Gotta do twice the accident-free mileage to achieve parity with the sober 98%.
I disagree. The 1:100M statistic is too broad, and includes many extremely unsafe drivers. If we restrict our data to only people who drive sober, during normal weather conditions, no speed racing or other deliberately unsafe choices, what is the expected number of miles per fatality?
1 in a billion might be a conservative target. I can appreciate that statistically, reaching parity should be a net improvement over the status quo, but that only works if we somehow force 100% adoption. In the meantime, my choice to use a self-driving car has to assess its risk compared to my driving, not the drunk's.
> They need to be around parity.
I don't think so.
The deaths from self-driving accidents will look _strange_ and _inhuman_ to most people. The negative PR from self-driving accidents will be much worse for every single fatal collision than a human driven fatality.
I think these things genuinely need to be significantly safer for society to be willing to tolerate the accidents that do happen. Maybe not a full order of magnitude safer, but I think it will need to be clearly safer than human drivers and not just at parity.