These companies cannot be trusted to be honest about incidents or near incidents. They like to crow about safety, but the safety they want credit for is entirely hypothetical.
There is no good reason to believe that autonomous vehicles are actually safer. They haven’t yet been tested enough, and the testing that has been done cannot be generalized to new situations.
I believe they would be safer if all roads were fully digitized, controlled, with no pedestrians and no other human drivers. We have something like that, now, called railroads.
They are already required to report every accident to a public agency in California.
And the safety is not hypothetical. Waymo is driving millions of miles a month in places like Phoenix. They have a ton of data to support the fact that their cars are significantly safer than human drivers.
They are required to report every accident, but not every mile these cars drive and in what conditions, so this data is unfortunately insufficient to make valid comparisons with human drivers...
Really, the problem is the transparency of tech companies. If self-driving cars are really safer, then tech companies need to prove it by releasing more data than necessary, rather than less!
They are not required to report incidents which have a negative impact on other road users. The SFFD is collecting that data, and it shows that these cars are not able to interact correctly with public safety vehicles and personnel.
There is no good reason to believe that autonomous vehicles are actually safer. They haven’t yet been tested enough, and the testing that has been done cannot be generalized to new situations.
I believe they would be safer if all roads were fully digitized, controlled, with no pedestrians and no other human drivers. We have something like that, now, called railroads.
Mass transit is the better investment.