I think I understand the difference between “error” and “mistake”, but today I saw [this article](https://medium.com/backchannel/the-view-from-the-front-seat-of-the-google-self-driving-car-46fc9f3e6088) about Google’s self-driving cars that has the following sentence:

> 
> A lot of this won’t be a surprise, especially if you already know that driver *error* causes 94% of crashes.
> 
> 
> 

(Here “driver” refers to a person who drives a car, not to a part of computer software.)

On the one hand, it looks like the author is a native speaker. But on the other hand, my intuition and understanding of English tells me that it is incorrect to use “error” there, isn’t it?