Lots of human caused accidents were driving into obvious things too. I don't drive drunk or sleepy, so maybe I'm above average, but my only standard for safety for a self driving car is that it's safer than me driving.
Source: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1106613_how-safe-is-tesl...
Stats are on low page 2 and high page 3.
TLDR: Tesla compared their numbers to a statistic that includes much more dangerous forms of transport(bike, 18-wheelers, whatever). The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety did a study on just driver fatalities in passenger vehicles(cars and light trucks) and came up with 1 fatality / 438 million miles driven. Versus the Tesla figure of 1 / 130 million miles.
Whole article is worth reading as it goes into more detail on statistical issues with Tesla's safety statistic claims.
I'll add that human driving ability is not uniformly distributed. Most accidents are due to particular demographic groups: people that drink and drive, teenagers. It's entirely possible for a self-driving car to be worse at driving than most humans, while still better than the average. In that scenario getting really bad drivers into self-driving cars would improve average accident numbers, but getting non-bad drivers(aka the majority of drivers) into self-driving cars would make average accident numbers worse.
Or airplanes - autopilot in planes has contributed tremendously to improving flying safety, but every time there is a crash under autopilot both Boeing and Airbus will ground every single plane of the same type to figure out the cause, they don't just go "oh well, it's still safer than flying manually so it's good for us".
I really don't understand this notion that an autonomous car merely needs to be "better than average driver" to be allowed on the road. Absolutely disagree here.
Traffic kills so many people annually, that even a slight increase in safety is going to save more lives that are lost to aircraft accidents, radiotheraphy machine failure and such.
Who'd want an autonomous car that's merely better than the _average_ driver, when every driver knows they're above average :)
Let's take airbags as an example. Do you understand why airbags are allowed, or do you also find it obvious that airbags shouldn't be certified as safe to use? Airbags provide increased passenger safety on a statistical basis, as they mostly provide a cushion for impact. However there are plenty of edge cases where if you sit too close to an airbag, or let your small child sit next to an airbag, then that airbag will actually cause significant damage that wouldn't happen without the airbag.
Autonomous driving can be viewed from the same safety perspective as airbags. Sure there are new edge cases that can cause harm, but on a statistical basis if the AI is even just slightly safer than a human, then at the end of the day there will be fewer accidents and fewer deaths.
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Your airplane example is a straw man argument. Nobody has claimed that we should stop advancing AI driving tech once we slightly surpass human skills. That's just the point where it makes sense to allow it on public roads.
The worst case is better and the average case is better because you've eliminated some outliers. However,the median is far worse. The group is effectively being punished to reduce the effect of the worst performing members.
An AI that drives into a partial lane obstruction is only better than no AI for a very small number of cases.
(Do you feel lucky?)
