This is the important statistic. Evidence so far points to autonomous drivers being worse than human drivers. In which they definitely have no place on the streets without a lot more R&D.

what about tesla though? by november 2016 they've accumulated 1.3 billion self droven miles [1]. autopilot was released in september 2014, so that's 2 years, or 600 million miles per year. and that was ramping up during those years, so i think it's safe to assume at least 1 billion miles / year these days.

2 deaths in over 2 billion miles is roughly 10 times safer than human drivers.

[1] https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles...

I don't think that is a fair comparison/calculation, autopilot is not "autonomous" (or not as autonomous as the Uber experimental car involved in this crash), and the demography of Tesla drivers is most probably much off "generic" car drivers, and driven miles, which include any kind of car (in the sense of including older cars in bad maintenance state or simply with inferior braking and steering systems when compared to brand new cars) and any kind of drivers (in the sense of drivers at a higher risk of accident).

Absolutely true, but keep in mind as well that each of these companies is running a completely different tech stack, for different use cases. They can't be lumped together for comparison.

Autopilot is not self-driving. The autopilot mode disengages if your hands are not on the wheel. Furthermore, users are advised to only use it in relatively safe situations.