What data shows this? Has there been a public release of sufficient amount of data to support your claim?
Tesla Autopilot has driven in total 1.6 billion miles on highways, in clear conditions, in modern high-crash-safety cars. There have been 3 fatalities.
The equivalent number for 1.6 billion miles across all road types, all weather conditions and all types of vehicles would be 22 deaths in the US. But in the UK that number would only be 8, illustrating that safety is tightly linked with road conditions and vehicle demographics.
As the Autopilot is only used in the easiest conditions and safest cars, there is simply not enough statistics to say whether they are safer or not.
You would have to collect data on a single version of the system for half a decade before you could say anything certain.
Exactly the data you cited. I agree that we need more data, but it does seem that we're not "sacrificing lives" to get autonomous driving to work, does it?
To be honest: probably at around 50 billion miles driven with a single version of the autonomous system without any fatalities. That would be a milestone where you could say without a doubt "we've made a leap change to car safety".
The gold standard for other safety critical systems like medical devices, commercial aviation etc. is less than one fatality per billion operating hours. 50 mph avg gets you 50 billion miles. A vision for car safety that doesn't approach this level isn't much to write home about, it would in fact be difficult to distinguish from just waiting 15 years to let the statistics incorporate the safety systems that already exist today.
According to Wikipedia there were 1.16 fatalities per 100 vehicle miles traveled in 2017. Why do you say autonomous cars need to be over 50x safer to be better than human drivers?
Because that number is averaged over all types of vehicles, in all types of weather conditions. It includes people crashing in their '95 Honda Civic. It includes people forgetting to look over their shoulder when switching lanes. Crash survivability and "non-smart" safety features like blind spot warning has increased significantly the past ten-fifteen years. Just waiting until most of the old cars on the road today are replaced with newer ones will yield a 5x to 10x improvement, if we keep the human drivers, assuming no new tech at all.
For instance the UK is already below 0.5 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles. Car demographics matter a lot.
So if autonomous is going to give us a significant improvement, it has to be something like 50x better than the average for humans today.
Also you can look at the safest countries worldwide, compared to the US, to get a feel for what's achievable with today's tech. Looks like Norway is the safest, with 4x better safety statistics than the US. That's probably a combination of better drivers education and safer vehicles, so not straight forward to compare. So really, you would need something like a 50x improvement over current US rates for it to be a notable achievement.
So, the headline of the article is wrong IMO, but in the article the author makes the correct points.