Humans avoid accidents 99.999819% of the time.
Are autonomous (fully autonomous) cars just around the corner? The brands are working on it, but the truth is that matching the level of safety that a human driving supposes is not easy, no matter how much we complain that people drive horribly.
Following a tweet from Matt Farah, in which he pointed out that a system that controls a vehicle and is safe 99.9% of the time is actually very insecure, the Jalopnik colleagues have been doing calculations on how safe it is then that a human drives, and the truth is that the results are quite striking.
The medium has taken data from the US market and traffic, but the truth is that the conclusion can be extrapolated to other parts of the world.
I don’t know who needs to hear this but if a system that controls a vehicle is safe 99.9% of the time, that is a VERY unsafe system. It needs to be several orders of magnitude safer in order to actually be safe.
— Matt “Stick to Cars” Farah (@TheSmokingTire) February 27, 2023
According to 2021 reports, according to the NHTSA, Americans drove a total of 2,903,622,000 miles that year. In addition, a total of 5,250,837 accidents occurred during that period. The result is that there was a mishap once for every 552,983 miles driven.
Dividing accidents by miles driven, results in 0.00000181 accidents per mile. This, multiplied by 100 results in an accident rate of 0.000181%.
Doing the simple subtraction of subtracting this figure from the total, that is, 100, the result is that human drivers drive safely 99.999819% of the time.
This is a very remarkable figure and it is that, although we see accidents on our roads on a more or less regular basis, the truth is that with the enormous amount of displacement that occurs every day throughout the world, actually, worldwide Relatively few accidents occur.
Thus, the truth is that getting to that point (especially those last decimal places, which seem to matter little, but in reality represent a significant difference in kilometers without accidents) implies that autonomous driving systems are going to have to fine-tune a lot to be better than human drivers.
