Electronics Weekly
The safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is also, in part, reflected in their crash/collision rate compared to all motor vehicles.
In 2023, more than 1,600 vehicles were registered for autonomous driving tests in California.
According to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), these vehicles drove a total of 9 million miles on California’s public roads in during the reporting period (Dec. 1, 2022-Nov. 30, 2023).
According to mandatory Autonomous Vehicle Collision Reports, autonomous test vehicles were involved in 132 collisions/accidents in 2023, which puts AVs at a crash rate of 14.6 per million vehicle miles.
While this is an improvement from previous years, it’s still considerably worse than the overall accident rate for motor vehicles in the United States: For 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated 1.9 police-reported accidents per million vehicle miles traveled, suggesting that autonomous cars are not yet ready for mass adoption.
I think you need to compare apples with apples. A lot of miles in the US will be driven on relatively open, traffic-light, freeways, whereas autonomous vehicles in California tend to be deployed in congested urban areas. You’d expect a higher collision rate for autonomous vehicles in that case.
(The comparison may still be bad, but comparing apples with oranges only tells you that apples aren’t oranges 🙂
I think that is an incorrect comparison. The robo taxis are currently limited to inner cities, to avoid the greater risk of higher speeds on the highways. It is therefore not correct to compare accident rate with that of all other cars that drive a lot of their miles on the highways. But I don’t know if accident rates for inner city miles for regular cars are available (Tesla has that).
What can also be done is compare the fatality rates per mile between robo and regular cars. In that case the fact that robo taxis remain within the inner cities at lower speeds probably works in their favor. I am guessing that with those numbers the robo taxi probably do better than regular cars.
Perhaps a journalist could do some research into that …
A journo could point out that nowhere in this post are robotaxis mentioned, DontAgree, these are figures from the Califotnia DMV and US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for all autonomous cars under test whether driven in cities or on freeways.
Are there any ‘autonomous vehicles’ other than robo-taxis ???
The report in the link mostly shows Waymo and Zoox, which are both robo-taxis.
Yes, DontAgree, loads of them. California’s DMV has issued Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permits to 30 companies but only two companies, Waymo and Tesla, are operating robotaxis (and Tesla only has 24 of those) while Waymo uses driverless cars for other things like mapping and data collection, and food delivery