You'd also have to factor in the times the human operator has to take over for the autopilot to prevent accidents.

Many articles and press releases make it look like self-driving is "already here" when it's actually still very much a work in progress and not at all a solved problem

I understand statistics but that doesn't make the distinction trivial. Nobody is suggesting (I think) that we should ignore any problems these vehicles represent. That we even need to "argue" this is kind of crazy: lots of people die, get in car minor/moderate/severe accidents that cause injuries, etc. and there is no computer at fault. Getting into a car accident that isn't your fault is basically random.

So why pretend like it's not important to cite how many people die today? We write laws and rules for how to operate vehicles that can be observed and operated by a computer. It's very likely that at a certain point those computers will exceed our aggregate ability to prevent deaths.

There are likely also wins we could get from the design of vehicles by not having to accommodate a human driver. Take for example the window that a person can be ejected from the vehicle through or debris can easily penetrate.

It's an apples-to-oranges comparison at the outset. Autonomous cars are overseen by humans, drive only in good weather, and do almost all their driving at low speed. At the very least, you should be comparing human data at low speed and in good weather.

I agree, but it's more misleading to have headlines about a self-driving car that crashed without mentioning it's not the self-driving car's fault (and without mentioning nobody was even injured).

It's too early to know who is to blame, or even if blame can be assigned so cleanly. Meanwhile, we have Uber's own reports that say that human drivers have to physically intervene during autonomous operation at a rate of one intervention per mile http://www.recode.net/2017/3/16/14938116/uber-travis-kalanic...

Uber is pretty middle of the pack as far as the state of their progress developing this technology is concerned. One intervention per mile on average isn't any kind of scathing indictment of Uber's autonomous driving program. The sensationalism of Uber's leaked intervention report mostly just illustrates a disconnect between public perception about where the technology is at, and where it's really at.

There are 23 other companies with permits to test autonomous vehicles in CA and they're all doing pretty much the same thing. Waymo is way out in front, Cruise/GM is doing well, but there are maybe a half dozen large, deeply invested players (including Tesla) not nearly as advanced as Uber.

It's possible, of course, that Uber was the victim of nasty coincidence. But bad accidents like this are rare. Most people go many hundreds of thousands of miles between rollover collisions or other equally severe accidents. Uber's self driving car program in Arizona is only a couple of months old. It's not a bad presumption that this is not purely fate.

Yes. It's entirely possible that the other driver was 100% to blame but a rollover accident is actually a very serious accident even if there were apparently no serious injuries in this case. This wasn't some happens all the time fender bender.