More than that, you need to distinguish between accidents and fatalities and then you need to put them both against the number of miles driven. In the US we're currently at about 36,000 fatalities per year with about 3 trillion miles driven.

> I'd guess the maximum acceptable rate would be no more than one collision in multiple years of driving.

Again.. terrible metric. The rate versus the number of miles driven _while in autonomous mode_ is what you really want to consider; and anything worse than the current numbers is absolutely unacceptable.

> For a self-driving fleet taxi with a remote operator able to take over and help it when it gets stuck, it may be.

I'm not sure that's better, or an acceptable solution. Remotely controlled, how? Do we put limits on that system? Are limits always a good idea given the context it's expected to be used in? How long between alert and remote control? What's the expected latency of drive controls, given that light actually moves pretty slow relative to the planet's size? Then, how do we secure any of that?

Either the system works better than humans, or it shouldn't be deployed. Limited trials, a good grip on the numbers and a strong regulator are what's needed.

That's really high, that's worse than what people do (on average a person will probably have an accident every 18 years, none fatal).

And that's with a person watching? That's really bad.

> once every few months is perfectly acceptable

Not really. The people inside it will have no practice (or even ability) at driving. Such a car is not really useful, you'll just make things more dangerous, not less.

The bar for self driving cars is so incredibly high, I doubt you'll see them on regular (non-instrumented, restricted) city streets until we have true AI.

Most likely there will be train-like intercity roads, dedicated (and instrumented) for self driving cars and trucks.

But unrestricted city driving? Very unlikely to ever happen.

Despite how high the accident rate is, people are actually really really good at driving. And computers are really really bad at being reliable.

When you can have a complex computer program that simply manages to have 99.9999% uptime, then we can start to talk about self driving cars. We don't even have that, self driving cars are an impossible dream.

And that 99.9999% number is not just random, it's how good you have to be to beat a human at driving.