Of course it's evidence of something!

Suppose, as a massive oversimplification, Uber's self-driving cars crash with some constant probability P for every mile driven (i.e. a Bernoulli process).

We now have learned at least one thing with absolute confidence: P > 0.

The first mile driven before the accident, of course, also showed P < 1.

But beyond absolute certainty, we also have a better idea of the actual value of P. (Intuitively, the longer we go without a crash, the lower we suspect P to be, and for every crash, we increase our estimate of P).

If there was only one crash in 3 million miles driven, this is evidence for values of P near 1/(3 million), and evidence against values of P far from it.

Is it strong evidence? Nope! But it's evidence!

It just takes one fish in the milk, to paraphrase Thoreau.

Something happened that just shouldn't be possible, with Lidar and half-competent AI - which we use in good part because cameras don't handle low-contrast nearly as well as human eyes, say at night.

The singular of data is an anecdote, as they say.

> It could easily be that humans are also an order of magnitude more dangerous at night.

Given that the actual circumstances of the death (pedestrian crossing left to right in a large road with the car in the rightmost lane) was a case that autonomous cars should've been much more equipped to deal with, and the Uber clearly failed, it's not promising. Autonomous cars were supposed to be better than humans; this particular one does not seem to be, given that as a human I can pretty clearly see someone crossing from the far side of the road.

I am not the OP, but this numbers are not confirming the optimistic view that self driving cars are better, so if we do not have numbers that show that are better and even with a human driver inside we had a few incidents then the number without human driver inside would have been larger, so how should we determine that the self driving car X is ready to be released on public roads for testing? At least we should have some basic tests done by an impartial authority.

I'm not sure that's the point you want to make, an order of magnitude making Uber 2.5x more dangerous still.