The Next Great Solution for Not Getting Killed are Self driving cars, because autonomous vehicles could potentially drastically bring down accidents by minimizing opportunities for human error. As an estimation, now 8% of the self-driving cars on the road in California have been in collision and the error was not human.
Since receiving permits to test in September four out of 50 unknown self driving cars driving around California have been in accidents. Three of them were Lexus SUV’s, part of Google’s self driving cars program and a testing car from Delphi, another autonomous car maker.
While the cars were in control, 2 accidents occurred. On the other hand, 2 more accidents occurred when the person who still must be behind the wheel was driving, another similar person with the accident reports was told by The Associated Press.
The Chicago Tribune pointed towards the rate of accidents which is really high compared to the regular old dumb cars. According to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the national rate for reported “property-damage-only crashes ” is about 0.3 per 100,000 miles driven.
Heralding an era of safer transportation the self driving cars concept can only work if the cars can drive better than people.
So far, none of the accidents is marked as major and surely there will be kinks that needs to be worked out while self- driving vehicles are in testing mode. According to Google’s words to the reporters, the difference between it crash records and the national average may be smaller than it looks since most of them don’t report minor collisions.
Unpredictably high percentage of 4 out of 50 cars getting into accident is still there and it shows how patchy automated car technology still is, especially when there dangerous vehicles are during around our ill-managed streets.
