Abstract: To receive authority certification for mass deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs), manufacturers need to justify that their AVs operate safer than human drivers. This in turn creates the need to estimate and model the collision rate (failure rate) of an AV taking all possible errors and driving situations into account. In other words, there is the strong demand for comprehensive Mean Time between Failure (MTBF) models for AVs. The disclosure describes such a generic and scalable model that creates a link between errors in the perception system to vehicle-level failures (collisions). Using this model, requirements for the perception quality may then be derived based on the desired vehicle-level MTBF, or vice versa, to obtain an MTBF value given a certain mission profile and perception quality.