The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash.
The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless.
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven.
So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.
Sir this is a Wendy's, I mean a discussion about autonomous vehicles. The benchmark for the autonomous vehicles in the USA is in comparison to humans in the USA. That means autonomous vehicles need to go ~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes to equal the mean driver. The mean US driver is a very high bar to reach for technology, that is why Waymo has just maybe barely reached that bar after nearly two decades and billions of dollars.
> "~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes"
That's between fatalities, not between crashes. The reported injury rate is 62 times higher than the fatality rate, and the overall police-reported crash rate is 170 times higher than the fatal crash rate.
You are correct, I missed the adjective on my second use. As my points were exclusively about fatal crashes and I never mentioned the injury or crash rate at any point and previously used 5,500 years exclusively in relation to fatal crashes, it should be obvious that I intended to mean that and my point still stands with that correction.
My primary concern is with your treatment of "unsafe" as meaning nothing less than "dead".
80% of the data (for fatalities per km) in that table is missing
Remember, I'm responding specifically to how good people are at driving, not how likely they are to die while driving. How likely a person is to die is mediated by all kinds of things that have nothing to do with how good they are as a driver, like airbags and seatbelts and crumple zones.
In thread context, you're conflating a bunch of things, and it screws up your position as each additional conflation gets you further and further from your headline statistic into "??? -> Profit" underpants gnomes territory.
1) Fatalities vs non-fatal injuries. Not the same thing.
2) Crashes that caused injury vs crashes that did not cause injury. Not the same thing.
3) Crashes that did not cause injury vs crashes that could not have caused injury. Not the same thing.
4) Crashes vs unsafe behaviors that could cause a crash. Not the same thing.
5) Being "safe" in the sense of "enjoying fortunate circumstance" vs being "safe" in the sense of "actively contributing to safety". Not the same thing.
Here is a thought experiment for you to consider:
If you run a red light and the cross traffic brakes and swerves around you, so no collision occurs, were you driving safely? No, right? Then why would you think that fatalities are the true measure of driving goodness?