[ars]

> no more than one collision in multiple years of driving

That's really high, that's worse than what people do (on average a person will probably have an accident every 18 years, none fatal).

And that's with a person watching? That's really bad.

> once every few months is perfectly acceptable

Not really. The people inside it will have no practice (or even ability) at driving. Such a car is not really useful, you'll just make things more dangerous, not less.

The bar for self driving cars is so incredibly high, I doubt you'll see them on regular (non-instrumented, restricted) city streets until we have true AI.

Most likely there will be train-like intercity roads, dedicated (and instrumented) for self driving cars and trucks.

But unrestricted city driving? Very unlikely to ever happen.

Despite how high the accident rate is, people are actually really really good at driving. And computers are really really bad at being reliable.

When you can have a complex computer program that simply manages to have 99.9999% uptime, then we can start to talk about self driving cars. We don't even have that, self driving cars are an impossible dream.

And that 99.9999% number is not just random, it's how good you have to be to beat a human at driving.

[kurthr]

Hmmm... I think I read the same insurance statistic and the number was 17.9 years, which is close enough. The concerning bit was that the number came from insurance claims not accidents, which might be under-reported, because nobody wants their insurance to go up! As a result many parking bumper dings, minor side swipes of other cars, bicycles, and pedestrians probably aren't reported.

Otherwise, judging from the bumpers of most cars in NY/SF... I would guess that each person had filed hundreds of claims.

[Judgmentality]

What about self-driving trucks on highways?

[carlmr]

>Despite how high the accident rate is, people are actually really really good at driving. And computers are really really bad at being reliable.

Human swarm behavior is terrible (that's your rush hour traffic for you). And computers are very very reliable. The only question is whether they can be programmed in a way to handle enough edge cases to be feasible.

I'm with you in thinking that for the next 20 years we'll see a lot of automation on high ways but not in cities. On the highways there's very much less variability, and less erratic human driving. For me that's already 99% of what I would buy a self driving car for. I'm happy driving short trips through the city. I hate driving home for 2-3h and not being able to do anything else.