As long as the U.S. personal-injury legal system remains in place (with strong support from media coverage of fatal crashes), it won't be enough for self-driving systems to have lower death rates/mile in aggregate. They will need to be better or equal to human performance in every subcategory of driving. That's really hard.

To wit: It's not enough to say "Our self-driving cars avoid 14,000 drunk-driving, texting and asleep-at-the-wheel fatalities," if it's also true that: "Our self-driving cars hit and kill 30 errant pedestrians a year that a human driver would have noticed."

I know that 14,000 > 30. But the specter of roadway martyrs being murdered by killing machines needs only a few examples to sustain itself.

Tough problem to solve.

They don’t need to match in every category, they just need to match in one category and then detect when they’re in that situation.

It will be a gradual transition as they learn how to handle more and more situations.

Self-driving cars will also kill a lot of people. We just don’t know how many yet.

It will very likely kill far fewer per mile driven than humans do. Unfortunately you're right -- it probably still will kill some. Even nonfatal accidents will be scrutinized heavily and leave a lasting impression of fear/loss of control.

I'd wager a relatively small percentage of drivers account for a relatively large percentage of deaths. Reckless driving, not driving as conditions permit, intoxicated drivers probably account for the vast majority of road fatalities, either directly or indirectly.

I don't believe a computer will ever be as good a driver as I am in my lifetime in terms of my personal safety, except for when I'm really old and possibly can't see well.

That's totally unproven, the technology doesn't even exist yet and we're still assuming we know what it will look like. In their current state self driving cars would kill far more people than humans if all cars used self driving 100% of the time, and no one knows if we will ever move past that.

Despite the imperfect technology, I'd bet that if we could somehow make all cars autonomous today (with current tech) and network them all together, it would drastically reduce both accidents and fatalities.

The vast majority of accidents by human drivers are caused by basic neglect, not tricky edge case situations. I think it's hard to really comprehend just how bad humans are at driving. It wouldn't take anything close to a perfect autonomous system to do better--just having "drivers" that actually pay attention to their surroundings all the time would be a massive improvement, even if there were occasional bugs and glitches.

> In their current state self driving cars would kill far more people than humans if all cars used self driving 100% of the time, and no one knows if we will ever move past that.

Really? No one knows if we will ever improve on self-driving cars than the current technology today? I'm going to stick my neck out and say "Yes, I know that will move past that."

The current state of self driving cars is transient. That much is proven. They aren't getting worse.