The State of Autonomous Vehicle Safety

The inclusion of assisted driving, which aids the driver of a car with braking or steering in specific situations, has been the norm for newly manufactured automobiles for a while now. Fully autonomous driving, however, is still not considered ready for the mass market, even though the development and deployment of robotaxis in select cities in China and the U.S. have been advancing at a steady pace.

One major roadblock often brought up by critics is safety issues, which led to the suspension of the driverless testing permits for General Motors' AV subsidiary Cruise in San Francisco in 2023 after an accident with a pedestrian. 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.

There is a bit of a reporting bias to these figures, though, as every minor collision involving autonomous vehicles is reported, while many minor accidents involving human drivers go unreported.