Why the Self-driving “March of Nines” is a Paper Tiger

With speculation swirling around who will be the winner in autonomous vehicles, much has been made about the “march of nines,” which for the uninitiated refers to the long tail of rare corner cases that a vehicle might encounter. Think overturned cars, debris on the roadway, tornados, road defects, and any other rare but absolutely real occurrence that a driver might encounter. Thus, a vehicle that is 99.999% “safe” crashes once every 100k miles on average. Each nine we add after the decimal increases safety by an order of magnitude. A vocal contingent of armchair analysts purport this to be a problem that will yet take many years and up to a decade to solve. I believe that based on an analysis of self driving system architecture, this pessimism is misplaced, and that the march of nines is largely a paper tiger, bearing no sharp teeth. <a href="https://medium.com/@msa_91649/why-the-self-driving-march-of-nines-is-a-paper-tiger-ff9321bf2fb9">Click Here</a>