Waymos crash less than human drivers

Serious crash rates are a hockey stick pattern. 20% of the drivers cause 80% of the crashes, to a rough approximation. For the worst 20% of drivers, the Waymo is almost certainly better already.

Honestly, at this point I am more interested in whether they can operate their service profitably and affordably, because they are clearly nailing the technical side.

For example data from a 100 driver study, see table 2.11, p. 29. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/37370 Roughly the same number of drivers had 0 or 1 near-crashes as had 13-50+. One of the drivers had 56 near crashes and 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles! So the average isn't that helpful here.

Hmmm, perhaps a more-valuable representation would be how the average Waymo vehicle would place as a percentile ranking among human drivers, in accidents-per-mile.

Ex: "X% of humans do better than Waymo does in accidents per mile."

That would give us an intuition for what portion of humans ought to let the machine do the work.

P.S.: On the flip-side, it would not tell us how often those people drove. For example, if the Y% of worse-drivers happen to be people who barely ever drive in the first place, then helping automate that away wouldn't be as valuable. In contrast, if they were the ones who did the most driving...

the nature of the accidents also makes a difference tho.

A small fender bender is common in human drivers. A catastrophic crash (like t-boning into a bus) is rare (it'd make the news for example).

Autodriving, on the other hand, almost never makes fender benders. But they do t-bone into busses in rare occasions - which also makes the news.

If only it were easier to get the stats in the form of "damage in property/lives in the form of dollars per mile driven", that would let us kinda-combine both big tragic events with fender-benders.

(Yeah, I know it means putting an actuarial cost on a human life, but statistics means mathing things up.)