I wonder what the "deaths per vehicle miles" stats for autonomous vs human-piloted cars look like right now? Humans kill, what, 30,000 other humans a year or so in The US? But there's a _lot_ of vehicle miles driven. My guess is this one incident has likely pushed the autonomous car death rate per vehicle mile way beyond the current human piloted death rate per vehicle mile...
(Having said that, there's not much doubt in my mind that stuff like antilock brakes and autonomous emergency braking have reduced the road toll (and will reduce it further as these recent-ish technology become more common i the aged vehicle fleet) - I think the difference there is then those technologies are not nearly so inclined to make driver pay less attention to what's going on around them. I _hope_ people don't think "It's OK, I've got emergency braking - I'll just watch this tv show as I drive to work!")
This is the exact reason why we need Nationwide disclosures of automous miles driven. California requires this stat, so it's data is the most telling.
California .92 deaths per 100 million (human)vehicle miles traveled. There were only 500k autonomous miles driven in California last year.
I'd bet your guess about death rate per mile is right considering waymo which has largest and most advanced fleet only drove 2 million miles nationwide last year.
Does Tesla's autopilot count as autonomous? There has been one confirmed death in what is likely over half a billion miles of autopilot usage. That would seem to tip the rate back in favor of the autonomous cars over humans.
Autopilot does not count. I'm assuming it's because it requires people to be actively engaged in the task of driving and it only works in very specific situations. Tesla reported 0 miles of autonomous driving in CA on public roads last year.
If one incident can reverse your conclusion then the sample size isn't large enough to draw that conclusion.
With only one death, the only conclusions you could reasonably reach from statistics are either "we don't know yet" or "we've gone so many miles with only one death that we know it's safe enough." There's no reasonable way to argue from the stats that we know it's not safe.
(Having said that, there's not much doubt in my mind that stuff like antilock brakes and autonomous emergency braking have reduced the road toll (and will reduce it further as these recent-ish technology become more common i the aged vehicle fleet) - I think the difference there is then those technologies are not nearly so inclined to make driver pay less attention to what's going on around them. I _hope_ people don't think "It's OK, I've got emergency braking - I'll just watch this tv show as I drive to work!")