The modern autonomous cars controlled by computers work better than those which humans drive.
A death in the past due to an autonomous car controlled and driven by autopilot gained a lot of attention and it played a vital role in the resurrection of the debate behind the safety of these vehicles.
As a matter of fact, there is only one death reported in the history of autonomous vehicles. On the contrary, human-operated vehicles were involved in a death toll of more than 1800 people in 2016 in the UK only. Moreover, if we take the globe as a reference, every year over 1.3 million people die in the road accidents and all of them involve vehicles controlled and driven by humans.
So the ratio of deaths between autonomous vehicles and human-driven vehicles comes out to be 1 to every 1.3 million deaths. This is how safe autonomous vehicles are. Even those of the world’s safest vehicles, like the ones produced by Mercedes, play a part in more deaths than autonomous vehicles.
In the US, a Tesla Model S accident occurred and it was only accident involving an autopilot. In the same year, US suffered more than 40 thousand deaths on its roads. Therefore, the comparison between the two is almost illogical.
Autonomous Vehicles Safety Levels
The road safety advisers and policymakers say that the autonomous vehicles need to be twice as safer before they are released to run on the roads. For autonomous vehicles, voiding the threat ahead is easy but to circumvent a human error is a thing that still needs attention.
According to the experts, the car which crashed into the trailer was on autopilot and was unable to detect the trailer coming from the side. There was no fault in the autopilot and it was working perfectly fine but the human error by the trailer driver was irreversible and it crushed the vehicle and crumpled its engine.
To overcome these kinds of situations, it might take more than 15 or even 50 years to test the vehicles to that level. A report from a testing body says that the autonomous vehicles should be on the roads even when they are a bit safer than human-driven cars.
Current safety level
At the current level of safety, autonomous vehicles can save more than 3000 lives per year in the US and if released worldwide, they can save more than a million lives.
These autonomous cars are programmed to communicate with each other and thus they can prevent the accidents before they occur. It can be called a mutual understanding on the road which humans do not have at all. This ensures the coordination on the move to avoid accidents.
Autonomous vehicles record what they see on the road and also the type of dangers they face. Unlike the humans, all this data can be transferred to a new vehicle which will make the newer car equally intelligent as the older one.
It is just a notion of books now that future starts with the humans, but now the requirement is to learn the notion that how to be OK with these autonomous vehicles. It is an undeniable reality tech cars are the future of mobility.