Data on Safety Is NOT In

Despite conventional - and my own - opinion that driverless vehicles will be safer than today's human-operated ones, and despite a recent report paid for by Google, the jury is still out on whether and how much safer driverless vehicles will actually be.

Why do I say this when a university prepared the Google report?

All driverless vehicle performance thus far has been:

• At low speeds (Google cars at 25 mph),
• In good weather conditions, 
• Under test conditions (Ford's recent MCity snowy-day experiments), or
• On highways (Audi cross-country trip).

There are some limited shuttles in campus or campus-like settings and there is the recent Chinese Baidu 18-mile trip, but again, these provide scant data of normal speeds in mixed traffic or with pedestrians and cyclists nearby. 

Looks good so far

Though the Google cars and others have been on roads for a while and have good safety records - with no serious injuries or fatalities - and there are reasons, in theory, why a rational machine with better eyesight and judgment than humans, plus an inability to get bored, will be better at driving than we humans are, the real-world data is just not there yet to reach conclusions. I say this even as I am willing to hop aboard a driverless vehicle as quickly as I would walk onto an elevator or a subway. (With the snowstorm coming this weekend to DC, I will hesitate to get into my car for at least a week.)

The article I linked to above, discussing a January 2015 insurance report, did say something intriguing. The insurance report reportedly stated that driverless vehicles will operate at about the same safety level as middle-aged, sober, good human drivers. Assuming that is true and assuming we do not get an 80-90 percent reduction in crashes, that improvement alone (plus that I will read or watch movies and TV while en route) alone will be a huge improvement over our current record of 30,000-plus deaths each year in the US alone.

Alex

This past year, a sweet 24-year-old young man named Alex, the son of a dear friend, died in a car crash. His parents and his brother grieve anew with each holiday, each birthday, each season that is a first without him. Everyday the memories bombard them and I see his mother questioning how she will go on. And this is the experience of more than 30,000 families a year - the equivalent of an airplane crash each day. 

Even though I believe the data is not yet conclusive and even though I believe we will not eliminate injuries and fatalities, I urge on all of those who are working to make driverless vehicles a reality because they will be safer than the vehicles we have today. And I haven't even mentioned the huge ramifications for energy independence and efficiency.