Originally Posted By: MrHorspwer
Using these statistics, this year's tally (so far) would be: 1,247 pedestrians killed by a human operating a car, 1 pedestrian killed by a computer operating a car.
This is just a look at the stats, not a judgement. The statistics show that humans do a terrible job when it comes to pedestrian safety (I am sure responsibility falls on both sides: Pedestrians and drivers).
Not quite "statistics". You have to factor in how many autonomous cars are out there vs. how many human-driven cars are out there. See the difference?
Assuming there are 50 autonomous cars driving around this year, then you'd have 1/50 or 0.02 accident rate for autonomous cars. Now say there are 100 million cars driving around the U.S. with actual human drivers every day, and thats 1247/100,000,000=0.00001247 accident rate.
See the massive difference so far this year?
(Actually there are over 200,000,000 vehicles registered in the U.S., and I assume only less than half are very active day to day.)
Edit: I just found a report that says we have about 50 self-driving cars in the U.S. total, not 500 as I first guessed.