Yesterday, an article on Vox was published with the headline – A self-driving Uber car killed a pedestrian. Human drivers will kill 16 people today. This statistic, somehow both vastly understates the problem of human-driving, while at the same time also misleads people to the effectiveness and relative safety of driverless cars.

First, the 16 people refers to only pedestrians and only in the United States. With an estimated 40,200 people dying in motor vehicle accidents each year, that puts the average number of people that are killed by cars each day at around 110 and over 3,000 per month in the United States alone. To put that in perspective, just shy of 3,000 people died during the September 11th terrorist attacks, which means that the equivalent of a September 11th terrorist attack (in terms of deaths) occurs every month on U.S. soil – carried out simply by people driving.

The United States is only a drop in the bucket compared to the world-wide death toll, which is estimated at around 1,250,0000 to 1,300,0000 every year. That’s 1.3 Million. That translates to an average of more than 3500 people that are killed by cars every day worldwide. This doesn’t even touch the tens of millions who are injured or disabled every year, which is estimated at between 2.3 – 4.6 million in the United States alone, not to mention the financial costs in terms of healthcare costs, car repair, and insurance.

Now the obvious retort to this statistic is – millions if not billions of people are driving and thus they drive trillions of kilometres every year. Self-driving cars make up only a small percentage of this. This is true and brings up the second problem with the Vox article. Indeed, if we explore these stats using the number of miles driven, we get a much murkier picture, filled with nuance and caveats – but at least it’s more accurate.

The first caveat is that different countries have different rates of fatalities per km driven. Although the data is hard to find, some of it is available. For example, The United States has an average fatality rate of somewhere around 7.1 – 11 deaths / 1 billion kms driven. Brazil on the other hand is upwards of 55.9 deaths per billion km. South Korea and the Czech Republic fall between there at 14 – 16 deaths per billion km, while Australia, Denmark, and other Western-European countries are at the bottom end with 4 -6 deaths / per billion. Relatedly, different people have different rates as well, with younger drivers (16-19) accounting for three times more likely to be in a fatal accidents than those 20 or over. These rates drop off and level out from 30 -75 and then increase substantially for those over 75.

The second issue is that different driverless programs also have different rates. Waymo, Google’s self-driving program had driven approximately 4 million miles (6.4 million km) back in November 2017 (which, due to exponential improvement is now probably closer to 8 million), with 0 deaths. Tesla’s autopilot (which, in fairness, is limited), was reported to have clocked 222 million miles as of October 2016 but has also resulted in a fatality (a rate of about 5 deaths / billion kms). Uber, the offender of yesterday’s fatality, had only clocked about 2 million kms, resulting in an abysmal rate of 500 deaths / billion kms – although recent supports suggest that Uber may not have even been to blame.

Of course, an equally justifiable retort to those stats is the clichéd scientific response – ‘more evidence is needed’. Indeed, the data is both too nuanced and not large enough to make any strong conclusions, a paper published in 2016, suggests that driverless cars would have to drive upwards of ten billion miles before any statistically reliable conclusions can be made – a point gladly made by a Washington Post article. Moreover, no-one is saying driverless cars have been perfected yet. Rather, they are still improving; not to mention that there may be increased efficiency gains if most/all cars are integrated and driverless. And while car-related fatality rates dropped considerably over the past 40 years, they have begun to level off, or even increase, such as the 7.2% and 8% increase in 2015 and 2016 in the United States. Thus, while current rates, particularly in the developed world seem to be pretty static – and still scarily abysmal, self-driving cars provide an opportunity to save time, money, and most importantly upwards of tens of thousands of lives and protect millions more from injury.

The motivation to write this post was two-fold. First, as noted, I felt the Vox article vastly understated the serious issues related to human driving. We really do need people to be aware of the consequences and be motivated to push forward automated driving.

Second, however, was that their headline was obviously misleading. The issue is that weak arguments tend to not just be non-effective, but counterproductive. If people can easily tear down the point you are making, they tend to feel like it supports the opposite point. This tends to happen among people who find the information incongruent – as they are motivated to reason why it’s wrong, while those who are in favour of the argument, are more likely to accept it. However, I saw the article on the r/futurology subreddit – a place dedicated to the “development of humanity, technology, and civilization” – and despite this being the psychographic that would generally be the most in favour of self-driving cars, the top comments were all highly (and rightfully) critical – pointing out that the statistics were misleading.

If the people who are least likely to be critical are still finding issues (in fairness, it was highly ‘upvoted’ suggesting that most people tended to happily agree with the premise without much criticism) – then the 63% – 75% of people who are afraid of riding in an autonomous vehicle are only going to see through this obvious issue and only polarize further. And every day we don’t have good reliable driverless cars is another day where hundreds, if not thousands of people will be injured or die.

The motivation of this post was to outline the seriousness of the driving problem but also to raise awareness of the need for nuanced reporting. If we are going to tackle big issues like this one, we can’t just be preaching to the people who already agree with us. Nuance and caveats might not sell as many papers or generate as many clicks and it might be harder to understand or even turn off some of the people who already agree. However, it has the advantage of creating a shared set of facts and expectations so that honest discussions can take place with those that disagree, in order to reach reasonable and rational decisions.

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