Why Autonomous Vehicles Need Billions of Miles Before We Can Trust the Trend Lines - CleanTechnica

The article discusses the current state of safety evidence for autonomous vehicles (AVs), focusing on Waymo’s reported data after roughly 100 million rider-only miles. Jonathan Slotkin’s analysis highlights that Waymo’s autonomous system shows significantly fewer airbag deployments, injuries, and serious crashes compared to human drivers, suggesting that AV technology can improve road safety. However, the article cautions that while these early results are promising, the sample size is still relatively small, and the "law of small numbers" warns against overinterpreting early data that may be statistically volatile or misleading. This concept is illustrated by the Gates Foundation’s small-schools initiative, where initial positive results did not scale as expected due to small sample sizes. The article emphasizes the enormous public health burden caused by human-driven vehicle crashes, which result in high fatalities, injuries, and economic costs globally. Human drivers are prone to errors such as distraction, fatigue, and rule-breaking, whereas autonomous systems do not suffer from these limitations. Therefore,