[SystemSafety] Autonomously Driven Car Kills Pedestrian

[Smith, Brian E. (ARC-TH)]

Note sure if such a comparison would pass muster statistically.  As of
2015, for human-driven passenger cars here in the U.S., there were about
1.18 fatalities per 100 million Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT).  Both the
numerator and denominator are large enough to make the ratio reliable.

In 2017, driverless cars accumulated only about 485,000 miles of testing
here in California.  If the single Arizona accident had happened in my
state, CA, then the rate would be 1 fatal accident every 485,000 miles for
³autonomous² vehicles or ~200 times greater than for human drivers.  But
the numerator is too small to be statistically reliable - basically
fatalities are too rare at this time.  Yes/no?

As data points, Uber racks up about 20,000 miles of on-road testing per
week.  U.S passenger cars drive approximately 45 million miles per week.

So we¹re pretty far off from being able to make apples-to-apples
comparisons.  One potential surrogate for the relative safety of
driverless cars is the rate of ³Safety Critical Disengagements² (SCDs) of
the automation that safety drivers need to make in real-world, on-road
tests.  California requires all companies doing AV testing here to
regularly report such SCDs.

In 2017, Waymo (Google) drove 352,000 test miles here in my state.  During
that testing, 63 SCDs needed to be made by the safety drivers or one for
every 5,600 miles.  See:

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/42aff875-7ab1-4115-a72a-97f6f24b2
3cc/Waymofull.pdf?MOD=AJPERES

This report covers disengagements following the California DMV definition,
which means ³a deactivation
of the autonomous mode when a failure of the autonomous technology is
detected or when the safe
operation of the vehicle requires that the autonomous vehicle test driver
disengage the autonomous mode
and take immediate manual control of the vehicle.² Section 227.46 of
Article 3.7 (Autonomous Vehicles)
of Title 13, Division 1, Chapter 1, California Code of Regulations.


Waymo has moved most of their test operations to Arizona where the weather
is more favorable for AV testing.  Might that bias the safety assessments
from their on-road tests there compared with say, environmental conditions
in a Michigan winter?

Brian Smith, NASA Ames


On 3/21/18, 11:10 AM, "systemsafety on behalf of Peter Bishop"
<systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de on behalf of
pgb at adelard.com> wrote:

>
>On 20/03/2018 12:01, C. Michael Holloway wrote:
>> There are a bunch of ridiculous
>> claims being made by the self-driving car zealots, which are
>> unfortunately being accepted by the US Congress. The most egregious is
>> the assertions about the number of lives that can saved. That's not a
>> reason it is an excuse. If saving lives was the motivation, there are
>> far simpler ways to accomplish it.
>
>Although we only have a sample of one (or maybe two if you include
>Tesla) it would be interesting to see how self drive compares with
>manual in terms of deaths per mile travelled at the present time.
>
>-- 
>
>Peter Bishop
>Chief Scientist
>Adelard LLP
>24 Waterside, 44-48 Wharf Rd, London N1 7UX
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