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by Anm 4054 days ago
The article is pretty clear that most of the light-damage, no-injury accidents don't get reported, and that all 11 accidents fell in that category. Half the point of the article is that this data is not well known.

Granted, taking those 1.45 and 55% figures, we might compare the 11 accidents to approximately 3.2 accident (reported and unreported) per million miles in passenger vehicles. Emphasis on "approximately".

1 comments

That 11 accidents is per 1.7 mil miles so the number you would want to compare is 6.5 not 11.

That said, I don't think you can compare those numbers because it really isn't clear what that "55%" number is supposed to mean.

Doing my own back of the envelope:

~3 trillion miles driven in 2010

drivers involed in PDO (property damage only) crashes: 18.5 million People injured in crashes in 2010: 4 million (from http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pubs/812013.pdf page 143) These numbers include estimates for unreported accidents

Expected crashes for self driving cars based on the above number 6.2 crashes per million miles 1.3 injuries per million miles

Actual number of crashes per million miles (11/1.7) 6.5 crashes per million miles 0 injuries per million miles

Of course, we have no idea if this comparison is at all valid. Given that the incidence of accidents is highly dependent on the ratio of highway miles to street miles, I doubt the comparison is at all accurate. I suspect that since the greatest challenge to self driving cars in on streets, self driving cars have traveled a higher ratio of street to highway miles than normal.