I’m still up in the air as to whether a road trip would be made better or worse by the car itself handling all the driving. Sure it means you can have a few extra ales the night before, but there’s something to be said for the long hours spent staring at the road ahead.

Now studies show that human error is the cause of 94% of all accidents, which is an argument often used by those in favour of taking us out from behind the wheel. According to a study published on TIME, however, it may be a while before we can empirically say if self-driving cars are safer:

…autonomous vehicles would need to be tested “hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles” to gain enough information to compare its safety to human-driven automobiles. Such thorough testing would require “tens and sometimes hundreds of years,” which would make it impractical to accomplish before clearing the vehicles for regular consumer use, the report said…

“The most autonomous miles any developer has logged are about 1.3 million, and that took several years,” study co-author and RAND senior statistician Susan Paddock said in a company statement. “Even if autonomous vehicle fleets are driven 10 million miles, one still would not be able to draw statistical conclusions about safety and reliability.”

Right, so we are essentially back to square one then. Except if you believe the study from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute:

[They] found that self-driving vehicles have been nearly five times as likely to get into accidents as those driven by humans. They also saw somewhat elevated numbers of injuries per crash compared to normal traffic but no fatalities.

Schoettle and Sivak based their October 2015 analysis on available data from California as well as more extensive data from Google. They then compared the number of accidents to 2013 national safety records. The researchers noted that the amount of recorded miles was low compared to conventional traffic.

The automated cars weren’t at fault in any of the crashes. Instead, they were struck when stopped or moving slowly in traffic and most frequently were rear-ended.

Perhaps it’s because self-driving cars don’t have anyone leaning out the window flipping the bird at cars that flout the rules of the road.

I’d love to see how they handle sharing the road with our local taxi drivers too, you can’t program those kind of reactions.

[source:time]

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