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The road towards self -driving cars is paved with promises to save people from themselves (and mutually). Waymo, Google’s self -driving project, says that “the status quo of road traffic safety is unacceptable” and that autonomous driving “save life”. Elon Muschus, never one who is exceeded, said In October, when Teslas Cybercab reveals that autonomous cars become “10 times safer than a person” and “save life – how many live”.
It is a worthy goal that sounds accessible. After all, people are terrible drivers, do you? In 2022, the last year, for which detailed data are available, 42,514 people were killed in motor vehicle traffic accidents on US streets. accordingly The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Of these deaths, 29 percent were killed in accelerated accidents, and 32 percent were classified as “alcohol -related fatal deadly deadly drivers”.
In contrast, drink and drive in contrast not self -driving cars. They do not accelerate because they run impatiently or late. You don’t get sleepy. They are not distracted by their phones. You also have a 360-degree vision. “You have to have eyes in mind,” I remember that a truck driver once told me. Autonomous vehicles actually do it.
For companies that manufacture the vehicles, there are two problems with their promise to save lives. The first is that human drivers have set the bar higher than they might think. As soon as you consider how many miles we drive, deaths are actually very rare. The death rate per 100 million vehicle miles in the USA was only 1.33 in 2022. It has been close to 1 decade for about a decade.
Waymo’s latest data Show The vehicles had only implemented 33 million miles without human drivers by the end of last year. This means that it simply did not drive approximately miles to achieve a statistical comparison with human drivers in the death rate.
Nevertheless, Waymo’s record looks encouraging in less serious accidents. The company Data analysis suggests that his vehicles had less causative of injury and previously reported police crashes compared to people in the same cities. Waymo told me that “the number of serious accidents is already significantly reduced compared to human drivers in places in which we work. But Phil Koopman, an autonomous expert in vehicle security, warns of self -satisfaction.” We know that computers are different fail as people, “he told me.” Human drivers fail individually, but (with) computers every car has the same driver, so something can happen that leads to it that they fail. “In addition, he says, may be computers Not drunk, but they don’t have “common sense” either.
That brings us to the second problem. Even if self -driving vehicle companies collect enough data to show that their technology saves life, there are still widespread examples of self -driving cars that make bizarre mistakes that most people would simply not make.
There was the Waymo -Taxi that drove round and round In circles in a parking lot with a confused passenger inside. Or the time that is not just a Waymos bumped into The back of the same pick-up truck, which was dragged down the road in a somewhat unusual angle and confused the software. It was the most serious time when a pedestrian was a pedestrian thrown Through another vehicle in the way of a General Motor Cruise self -driving car, which she then pulled 20 feet underneath. In this case a subsequent review commissioned by Cruise found that “a watchful and attentive human driver would be aware that a kind of effect had occurred and would not have driven further without further investigating the situation”.
It may be unfair, says Koopman, but it is human nature that stories like this remain more than statistics in the mind. If your sales argument “Our cars are safer drivers than humans”, then your case with the public is every time one of your cars does something strange that a person does not do so. Conversely, the accidents that have not taken place thanks to their technology rarely make the news.
That could be the reason annual surveys From the American Automobile Association show that people are afraid of technology over time. The proportion of US drivers who say that they trust self-driving vehicles fell from 14 percent in 2021 to 9 percent in 2024, while the proportion that says they are “fear” from 54 to 66 percent has increased.
Self -driving automotive companies could say that they want to save lives, but it becomes more difficult than they will convince to persuade people to try it out.
