Flutterby™! : Crash Rates

Missy Cummings, George Mason University: Assessing Readiness of Self-Driving Vehicles (preprint)

State agencies are increasingly faced with self-driving permit and licensing requests as self-driving operations expand. However, these expansions have led to congestion and problematic interactions with first responders, as well as increasing public distrust. To respond to these self-driving permit requests with evidence-based recommendations, government agencies need straightforward tools to help them objectively and holistically assess such requests. To this end, using self-driving disengagement data from California, as well as federal non-fatal and CA transportation network companies’ crash reports, this effort demonstrates how the combination of human- and autonomy-initiated disengagements, coupled with non-fatal crash rates, can provide insight into assessing self-driving vehicle readiness for commercial operations. Additional results show that Cruise’s and Waymo’s robo-taxis in San Francisco are 4-8x morelikely to be involved in non-fatal crashes, equivalent to the CA crash rates of Uber and Lyft. One major drawback to this approach is a lack of reporting by the majority of companies conducting self-driving operations on public roads in CA. This lack of reporting and companies’ avoidance of publicly address emerging problems, while simultaneously claiming their technologies are superior to human drivers, suggests there are systemic problematic safety cultures in the self-driving community. If self-driving companies do not adopt more transparent and responsive safety practices, their non-fatal crash rates could continue to exceed that of human drivers. They also risk further eroding public sentiment, which could lead to further public rejection of what otherwise could have been a promising technology.

I'mma just repeat that in bold: "Cruise’s and Waymo’s robo-taxis in San Francisco are 4-8x morelikely to be involved in non-fatal crashes, equivalent to the CA crash rates of Uber and Lyft"