Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road

[clasher]

I doubt that self-driving cars are safer than humans right now, Autonomous vehicle safety myths and facts. The blog is full of great information and analysis of whatever solid data the author can find. In that link near the bottom is a little blurb about Tesla autopilot and a flawed study the NHTSA. There is a link on the sidebar to the 2020 numbers, and a lot of other interesting stuff that I don't really understand since I'm not a tech person.

Elon Musk said a few years ago we'd have self-driving cars in 2020, so did a lot of people in 2010 and 1995, and so on. It's been "coming" for a long time apparently but it's still not here and probably won't be for decades.

The article you linked is at the URL: https://blog.piekniewski.info/ which is a big tip off that this is not a rigourous evaluation. The author has basically just assumed that a self driving car, when it requires the driver to take over, would instead have crashed, this is clearly a nonsense assumption, since the vehicle could instead have "stopped".

The author talks about he came up with that comparison, it's right in the link here, quoted so you can actually read what it says instead of making an assumption:

Nevertheless even if we take the number in which Waymo admits there would have been a crash, we get a crash every 635868/9 = 70652 miles. If we conservatively assume that every 100th disengagement for the rest of the pack would have lead to an accident, we get between 1760-63800 miles driven before a crash. If moreover equally conservatively we assume that 1/10 of these crashes would have lead to a fatality, we get a death in between 17600-706520 miles. Admittedly there are many assumptions here, but I try to be actually very favorable for the self driving cars. Hence we are off between two to four orders of magnitude in terms of safety as compared to humans. In this context the often repeated statement that "humans are such bad drivers" seems like a joke.

I know that is from 2018 but the data for 2020 is in another link on that site and it doesn't seem like there is a massive improvement, certainly not enough to say that autonomous cars are safer than people driving in all conditions, which is what matters.

Comparing the miles that autonomous cars have driven in largely favourable conditions to the entirety of human-driven miles driven in all conditions seems kind of disingenuous to me. Autonomous cars might work alright in sunny places that don't get rain and snow, and have more roads that are car-friendly than we do here... but they've gotta be able to handle winter and rain before we let them lose on the streets.

Even if autonomous cars hit the road in a few years, they're likely to be confined to using the 401 and other limited-access highways in auto-mode, and as you pointed out a few months ago, highway driving is already the safest kind of driving.