Driving to Safety : How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?

Abstract

How safe are autonomous vehicles? The answer is crucial for developing sound policies to govern their deployment. This report evaluates whether it is practical to test-drive autonomous vehicles to assess their safety. We find that it would take hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles of test-driving to provide clear statistical evidence of autonomous vehicle safety, suggesting it is not a practical approach.