Nissan IDS self driving concept
Studies of self-driving cars have already fount them more-or-less impossible to crash, but are still involved in proportionately more crashes than conventional cars. Why? Because people keep crashing into them.
A study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute on a a number of the companies approved for real-world testing in California (Google, Delphi and Audi) compared the safety record from early trials of self-driving cars against the overall U.S safety record for 2013.
The team found that self-driving cars were not at fault in any of the crashes they were involved in. Furthermore, the severity of injuries sustained was also lower for self-driving cars than conventional. However, the estimated crash rate per million miles traveled is higher than conventional vehicles because so many regular cars drove into the back of them: they’re 1.5 times more likely to be hit from behind, they have been sideswiped, and driven into from an angle.
So far head-on collisions have been totally avoided.
This study suggests we should be more wary of other drivers than autonomous cars: regular drivers crashed with fixed and non-fixed objects, as well as crashing into other cars. However every single self-driving car involved in an accident never actually hit anything – the other car hit them.
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