And before the argument "Self driving is acceptable so long as the accident/risk is lower than with human drivers" can I please get that out of the way: No it's not. Self driving needs to be orders of magnitude safer for us to acknowledge it. If they're merely as safe or slightly safer than humans we will never accept it. Becase humans have a "skin in the game". If you drive drunk, at least you're likely to be in the accident, or have personal liability. We accept the risks with humans because those humans accept risk. Self driving abstracts the legal risk, and removes the physical risk.

I'm willing to accept robotaxis, and accidents in robotaxis, but there needs to be some solid figures showing they are way _way_ safer than human drivers.

I think those figures are already starting to accumulate. Incidents like this are rare enough that they are news worthy. Almost every minor incident involving Waymo, Tesla's FSD, and similar solutions gets a lot of press. This was a major incident with a happy end. Those are quite rare. The lethal ones even rarer.

As for more data, there is a chicken egg problem. A phased roll out of waymo over several years has revealed many potential issues but is also remarkable in the low number of incidents with fatalities. The benefit of a gradual approach is that it builds confidence over time.

Tesla has some ways to go here. Though arguably, with many hundreds of thousands of paying users, if it was really unsafe, there would be some numbers on that. Normal statistics in the US are measured in ~17 deaths per 100K drivers per year. 40K+ fatalities overall. FSD for all its faults and failings isn't killing dozens of people per years. Nor is Waymo. It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison of course. But the bar for safety is pretty low as soon as you include human drivers.

Liability weighs higher for companies than safety. It's fine to them if people die, as long as they aren't liable. That's why the status quo is tolerated. Normalized for amounts of miles driven with and without autonomous, there's very little doubt that autonomous driving is already much safer. We can get more data at the price of more deaths by simply dragging out the testing phase.

Perfect is the enemy of good here. We can wait another few years (times ~40K deaths) or maybe allow technology to start lowering the amount of traffic deaths. Every year we wait means more deaths. Waiting here literally costs lives.

> I'm willing to accept robotaxis, and accidents in robotaxis, but there needs to be some solid figures showing they are way _way_ safer than human drivers.

Do you mean like this?

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

If waymo is to be believed, they hit the kid at 6mph and estimated that a human driver at full attention would have hit the kid at 14 mph. The waymo was traveling 17mph. The situation of "kid running out between cars" will likley never be solved either, because even with sub nanosecond reaction time, the car's mass and tire's traction physically caps how fast a change in velocity can happen.

I don't think we will ever see the video, as any contact is overall viewed negatively by the general public, but for non-hyperbolic types it would probably be pretty impressive.

>We accept the risks with humans because those humans accept risk.

It seems very strange to defend a system that is drastically less safe because when an accident happens, at least a human will be "liable". Does a human suffering consequences (paying a fine? losing their license? going to jail?) make an injury/death more acceptable, if it wouldn't have happened with a Waymo driver in the first place?

Orders of magnitude? Something like 100 people die on the road in the US each day. If self-driving tech could save 10 lives per day, that’s wouldn’t be good enough?

Have you been in a self driving car? There are some quite annoying hiccups, but they are already very safe. I would say safer than the average driver. Defensive driving is the norm. I can think of many times where the car has avoided other dangerous drivers or oblivious pedestrians before I realized why it was taking action.

I generally agree the bar is high.

But, human drivers often face very little accountability. Even drunk and reckless drivers are often let off with a slap on the wrist. Even killing someone results in minimal consequences.

There is a very strong bias here. Everyone has to drive (in most of America), and people tend to see themselves in the driver. Revoking a license often means someone can’t get to work.

That’s an incentive to reduce risk, but if you empirically show that the AV is even 10x safer, why wouldn’t you chalk that up as a win?

> Self driving needs to be orders of magnitude safer for us to acknowledge it. If they're merely as safe or slightly safer than humans we will never accept it

It’s already accepted. It’s already here. And Waymo is the safest in the set—we’re accepting objectively less-safe systems, too.

> Self driving needs to be orders of magnitude safer for us to acknowledge it

All data indicates that Waymo is ~10x safer so far.

"90% Fewer serious injury or worse crashes"

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/