Driverless Cars Far More Likely To Get Into Crashes

Auto manufacturers are on their way to making the "auto" in "automobile" literal, in that the auto will be able to drive itself, without any input from the person sitting behind the wheel, aka the-individual-previously-known-as-the-driver.

About 70 percent of all self-driving vehicle crashes occurred while the cars were stopped or going less than 5 miles per hour. The all-electric, high-powered Tesla recently downloaded some driverless features to its cars. It's made of carbon fiber, so it's a relatively lightweight vehicle.

"So far, they appear to be more likely to be in accidents, but remember those crashes were not their fault". No crash involving a self-driving vehicle was a head-on collision.

So if you take those numbers into consideration, as authors Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak note, it's probably about as safe, or a little safer, to be in a self-driving vehicle: "We presently can’t rule out, with a reasonable level of confidence, the possibility that the actual [crash] rates for self-driving vehicles are lower than for conventional vehicles". (Of the 10 companies approved to operate self-driving vehicles in California, only three were included, due to a lack of publicly available for the others.)

From that, it found that the self-driving cars crashed 9.1 times per million miles of travel, compared to 1.9 crashes per million miles for conventional vehicles, while also acknowledging that the self-driving cars had a lower fatality rate (0 compared to 0.01).

While 15.8 percent of crashes involving conventional cars involved a fixed object and 14 percent of crashes involving conventional cars involved a non-fixed object (like a pedestrian jay-walking), autonomous cars only ever collided with another vehicle.

What's most interesting, however, is the type of crash that conventional vs. autonomous cars tend to have.

Of course, there are tons of caveats here.

The self-driving cars were tested in temperate regions of the United States where snow and ice, which self-driving cars aren't prepared to deal with yet, are rarely a factor.

Earlier this year it was predicted that in the future, widespread adoption of self-driving cars could cut accident rates by as much as 90 percent.

 

The self-driving vehicles studied covered more than 1.2 million miles in 2013, experiencing 11 accidents in total, yielding 9.1 accidents per million miles. And of course designing better bike lanes and sidewalks to protect street users who aren't in cars can go along way in preventing crashes.