>Citation needed.

Sure!

Traffic fatalities in the US, human drivers: 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

Uber's self-driving car fatality rate: 1 death per 2 million miles[2]

That is, Uber's state-of-the-art is an order of magnitude worse than human drivers.

I know, you'll complain about small sample size. The thing is, assuming Uber's cars match humans, the chances of a collision happening only after 2 million miles are very small, like pulling an ace of spades out of a shuffled deck of cards.

The point is, we do have the data, and the data does not support optimistic beliefs.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

[2]https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/waymo-has-driven-10-mil...

I'm pretty sure if they were better than humans by any real statistical margin they would be trumpeting that in press releases. The fact that they work so hard to maintain such secrecy- only revealing data that they are legally mandated to- suggests that they, the people must familiar with the system performance, think it is inadequate.

In essence, because the people who control the data have an interest in revealing data that is superior to human performance, the lack of conclusive data on this leads to an inference that it isn't.