It's not just crashes per mile - it's the severity of the crashes that needs to be considered too. 5 fender benders is a better outcome than 1 horrific wreck that kills someone.

Is crashes/mile the best metric or mistakes/mile that could lead to a crash? I certainly make a TON of mistakes that I can correct before they lead to problems--most of them are mild, like having to break a half second later than I'd like, but i bet you are UNDERestimating the improvement due to self driving cars.

It's definitely crashes per mile. Unexpected stuff happens all the time on real roads -- black ice, debris, animals, flat tires -- and safety depends upon the driver's or software's ability to deal with them. It's easy for self-driving not to wander into another lane because they're changing the radio, but it's hard for them to deal with situations their designers didn't anticipate.

Why are you comparing self-driving cars to exclusively a "paying attention driver"?

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.

> 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]

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority

Consider that most driving is done feet away from another vehicle. If those cars start being replaced by self-driving cars, then the you are safer (system safety x personal safety). The car might make more dubious decisions than you would yourself, but now it has less opportunities for failure due to others driving erratically.

Somebody can crash into you.