In February they hit 1,000,000 miles cumulative for all previous years. Last week they hit 3,000,000 miles.

Cars kill about as many Americans as the Vietnam War, but every year. Aside from guns, I can't think of anything else so deadly that we give to our children as they enter adulthood.

It is common, it is not part of the news cycle. We care more about the unlikely terrorist. People are bad with numbers.

Personally, I think it would a huge ethics violation to not be running tests of autonomous cars (not talking Telsa toy driving stuff).

Anyone quoting "miles driven" is being disingenuous. How many of those miles were in the Bay Area plus Arizona?

How does the location have anything to do with the total number of miles driven?

Driving condition matter since they vary from place to place. It matters for people, and it most likely matters for autonomous vehicles (either due to training data sets or direct programming of traffic regulations). To choose a mundane example, that is admittedly more likely to affect people, consider how many people try to make a left turn into a (North American) roundabout or who park in a bike lane. (Sometimes it is deliberate, but sometimes it is an out of town person who has never dealt with it before.)

That said, I would expect a San Fransisco decision to be based upon San Francisco data.

True. They ought to have driven every block of every SF street by now.

But of course, things change.

Because the weather is so much more favorable in those two areas. States with extreme weather, especially snow & ice, are vastly more challenging.

It's like saying you tested your multi-platform app for 10,000 hours, but 9,800 of those hours were on Windows.

A cumulative 3,000,000 miles is nothing. The US Bureau of Transportation Statistics estimates there are over 3,000,000,000,000 miles of vehicle traffic per year.[1] The estimated number of fatalities is around 50,000. There is no way to assess whether there will be fewer or more traffic fatalities with current AV technology given the limited amount of data.

As for the unlikely terrorist bit, just in case you weren't around when 911 happened: even mathematically inclined people were shocked. Not only was it the most lethal attack on American soil (nearly 3,000 dead), it was a foreign attack. People genuinely didn't know what was going to happen and were living in fear for a while. Unfortunately, some people still carry those fears to this day. Even though the numbers don't back them up, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss their emotions and I certainly wouldn't attack them for the all too human mistake of misattributing risk.

[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles

Humans average 60,000,000 miles between fatalitys [1]. It is a average of 1.25 million miles between injurys. 3 million miles is not a statistically significant amount of data to make a valid estimate, not even close.

That is not to say that safe testing can not proceed or that they are being unsafe in their testing or validation process, but it is important to realize the actual magnitude of the status quo and what we are comparing against. People are bad with numbers.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... PDF Page 7

Anecdotally, I feel much safer around AVs as a pedestrian or cyclist than human driven vehicles. Way more predictable, especially post pandemic when it seems like half of drivers have some behavioral issue.

> Aside from guns, I can't think of anything else so deadly that we give to our children as they enter adulthood

Alcohol

Anyone seen the rushing dash cam videos where pedestrians are throwing themselves at cars in order to get legal liability payouts. Not that I'm accusing all of the reports here of being something like that, but I wonder if robotaxis are going to result in something like that and actually make the entire driving world a lot less ethical.

Then again it'll all be on camera so maybe not

You will always have opportunists. This article is not about that. The specific incident described by the article is about a car going through caution tape and getting caught up in a fallen overhead powerline. There's very little chance of payouts there, though there probably should be if considerable damage was caused. When it comes to interference with emergency responders, I also doubt it being a case of people looking for payouts.

A lot of AV enthusiasts seem to be painting the world as against them, when the reality is that people don't like being unwilling experimental subjects. If there was proof that AVs were safe, I could imagine people jumping on them in droves. Why would one reject having a vehicle where you have the option to drive yourself or have the driving being done for you? (I realize this article isn't about that scenario.) On the other hand, the tech industry's mantra of moving fast and breaking things - something that existed in practice long before the likes of Facebook - has bred an incredible amount of distrust. That distrust has only grown as it has shifted from the technology itself into grand social experiments.

> If there was proof that AVs were safe, I could imagine people jumping on them in droves

These services literally have waiting lists. San Francisco is simply a city that can’t help but distract itself from its endemic problems by torching those who wanted to bet on it. (All that said, I do blame these firms for prioritising San Francisco over another city in the Bay Area.)

The bulk of those are from Russia.