What is the crashes per miles for a paying attention driver? If it is 1 per million miles, the self driving car would need to be a lot lower. Now if it was 4am and I am falling asleep at the wheel, I bet any self driving car would beat me. So cool to turn on, but maybe not for a daytime cruise...
For self-driving cars to be safer than human drivers, there is no requirement that the self-driving cars should be better/safer than the best human driver... the self-driving car simply needs to be safer than the majority of humans.
That is true on a whole, but not true for ME. It needs to be safer than ME, not some hypotehtical average person.
Further compounding it:
> For driving skills, 93% of the U.S. sample and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50% [0]
Yes. However, the current failure rate of human drivers being improved on is the standard I care about.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/29/crash-data-for-self-driving-c...
> After crunching the data, Schoettle and Sivak concluded there's an average of 9.1 crashes involving self-driving vehicles per million miles traveled. That's more than double the rate of 4.1 crashes per one million miles involving conventional vehicles.
That is the only number that matters to me. Google gets that to 4.0 per million miles and I'd say they are good to go.