Our city (which is pretty small tbh, 150k) had 424 DUI arrests just this past weekend (Fri-Sun) due to St. Patrick's day. This is despite availability of uber, lyft, taxis, public transit, and bar services which will give you a ride home and allow you to park your car until morning.

Ignoring these facts is just as intellectually dishonest.

These cases are not what the parent comment was referring to.

The PP was insinuating that people with leraner's permit (and, by law, an experienced driver in the passenger seat) or people who just got a license (and hence were, literally, tested) are "insufficiently tested".

The PP was responding tho the claim that letting "insufficiently tested" systems on the road with the goal of letting them improve is irresponsible.

For the response to have any merit, you need to cite accident statistics for people with learner's permits, or new drivers.

To be clear, the testing for getting a learner's permit (where I live at least) is 7 out of 10 questions on a multiple choice test, and the test for a driver's license is a 20 minute drive-about where the driver gets to more or less choose the area they'll drive and the weather when the test is done.

I don't think it's even a very tough argument that these are at best basically limited filters on actual driver skill. I've known people who literally went to another city for favourable conditions for their driver test. I've known of people who passed having driven not much more than a few hours in their lives.

Nowadays if you want to be the driver in the passenger seat for a learner you need to do a somewhat more difficult test and be older.

Also, I'm really not talking about this specific case but I think it's particularly relevant that in this case there was a qualified driver able to take over for the autonomous vehicle, which is actually more supervision than a 14 year old with a learner's permit has.

Let’s look at the actual numbers. Here is a link to one such comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620968

Are you really scaling off a single data point? I feel like you'd also have to compare the types of driving. What is the death per 100 million miles on a city street? If you exclude highway miles I'd imagine it's much worse.

It is the only data we have. Ironically, one reason for the paucity of such data is that these companies have been so reluctant to make public their records—the reason this accident occurred in Arizona and not California is because Arizona has relaxed reporting requirements. And the commenter notes that extrapolating might not be wise.

Are you really asserting your statements without any fact whatsoever?

I did not assert anything other than that extrapolating a single data point doesn't really tell you anything and is pretty irrelevant.

I'm curious what your dispute is here. Unless you're reading something into it that I didn't say. I certainly didn't say most new drivers kill someone. But to say that this is not a thing that happens with a decent level of frequency is just silly. There is an actual reason insurance is higher for teenagers.

The post I'm responding to, from my perspective, has a flippant attitude towards the deaths caused by human drivers.