Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the guarantee we'll have only fully up-to-date, safety-checked self-driving vehicles in the future with no messed up sensors or controls (there'll be impaired people doing the checks, right? :))? This is simple with a small, experimental fleet — so we are looking at the best case scenario for these vehicles, but the question is what does it fall down to in a realistic commercial application? That would also be…
The study is about today. I would bot ever think to extrapolate that to “forever in the future” also is only one vendor. That is what the statistic shows and I think is fair comparison against human drivers currently on the street.
But they are purporting to make this the standard for comparing SDVs and HDVs, and explicitly want this report to influence policy. They say as much in the report.