You don't need an equal sample size to determine if autonomous cars are safer. But if you're comparing to all the cars on the road today, you need quality data that matches the distribution of cars today. Google isn't going to prove that autonomous cars are safer if they only test in Palo Alto in ideal weather conditions.
That's very true, but if you know your product well enough, and you perform well conducted experiments, you can come up with a good estimate for this without actually having your cars travel 100 billion miles.
Re:A Tragic Loss
by semi-extrinsic on Thursday June 30, 2016 @06:58PM
(#12012509)
Sure. The main issue with that is the unknown unknowns. In hypothetical cars an order of magnitude safer than today, we're talking about events so rare that a single (hypothetical) accident which kills all 7 passengers due to the Tesla misinterpreting an obscure Hungarian road sign meaning "bridge out ahead" will significantly influence your safety statistics.
There are enough youtube videos with people falling asleep in Tesla on the highway and a Tesla switching lanes and almost causing a frontal crash. These are known problems.
Maybe a billion miles are needed for a fatal crash, but for small mistakes it's much less.
> A normal car drives about 100 000 miles in 10 years.
Can you give a source for that number as it seems a bit low given warranty numbers.
A normal car drives about 100 000 miles in 10 years. You then need one million autonomous cars driving around for a decade before you even know whether they're safer!