Agree regarding the difficulty in evaluating across manufacturers in an objective way, especially using partial testing data from California.

I think we will absolutely need some sort of objective way to evaluate safety abilities of these systems once they are fully deployed, and I could definitely see NHTSA mandating some sort of fleet-wide statistics per manufacturer while vehicles are in autonomous mode.

I’m interested to know what sort of second or third order effects may happen as well, where the metrics mandated by the government could create weird behavior or decisions by manufacturers.

For instance if fleet-wide were determined by the US government to include a manufacturer’s autonomous vehicles operated inside and outside the US, we may see shell subsidiaries or differentiated driving software sourcing pop up so that GM could sell its cars in India (more chaotic roads) without affecting its fleet metrics in the USA.