Humans can be 30+% better than "humans" by 1. not using a phone and 2. not being drunk or stoned.
A few percent better than "humans" is quite bad relative to a semi-responsible human driver.
A few percent better than "humans" is quite bad relative to a semi-responsible human driver.
Yes it should be (imho) at least an order of magnitude better than humans before we consider it OK to not pay attention.
Not a few percentage points better as you say.
However, to overcome media drama, it probably will need to be not just one, but more like three or four orders of magnitude safer than humans, because of the “oh look, a Tesla had an accident” effect.
Or maybe I'm overthinking it and you're just talking about how hard it is to get the statistics (number of accidents) down overall?
Since drivers under the influence are less likely to die in an accident because most drugs either relax the muscles or delay reflexes enough to keep the body relaxed during an accident, preventing a lot of potential injury, it's an important nuance to consider. If the people most likely to drive drunk are the least likely to adopt self driving cars, there is an absolute floor to how much safer they can be.
If you assume vans have about the same crash protection as cars and some van drivers are idiots then I'd guess you could get 10x better than the average human just through driving skill/technique.
Per passenger mile. So if busses have 30 people on on average, the accident rate could be the same, just typically only one passenger dies.
That also makes sense with the vehicle characteristics. It's much harder to die by being ejected from the vehicle or by intrusions into the passenger compartment in a bus. Also, heavier, longer bus = more gentle deceleration.
Your statement might still be true (and I suspect it broadly is), but it just isn't backed up by the cited data.