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Autonomous cars won’t eliminate crashes – report

As the car industry applies the brakes on development of autonomous cars – and backtracks on promises over their ability and when they might become a reality – a report out of the US has caused more pause for thought.


A detailed analysis by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the US has determined autonomous cars may only be able to prevent one-third of crashes.

Road safety experts estimate humans cause about 94 per cent of crashes in the US, but autonomous cars – which are intended to take over most of a vehicle’s controls – won’t achieve a zero road toll, they say.

 

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The IIHS found that while autonomous vehicles will eventually “identify hazards and react faster than humans” and “won’t become distracted or drive drunk”, the safety body determined “stopping the rest of the crashes will be a lot harder”.

“We’re still going to see some issues even if autonomous vehicles might react more quickly than humans do. They’re not going to always be able to react instantaneously,” Jessica Cicchino, co-author of the IIHS study, told the AP news agency.

Even fewer crashes will be prevented during the long transition phase when autonomous cars share the road with vehicles controlled by humans, she warned.

The IIHS examined more than 5000 real-world car crashes based on data gathered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The safety body distinguished crashes caused by drivers affected by drugs or alcohol – or who fell asleep at the wheel – versus drivers who had crashed due to errors of judgment.

 

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It was determined that the effectiveness of autonomous cars at preventing crashes would depend on how each car was programmed to behave to avoid collisions.

“Autonomous vehicles need to not only perceive the world around them perfectly, they need to respond to what’s around them as well,” Jessica Cicchino, co-author of the IIHS study, told the AP news agency.

However, she cautioned, if autonomous cars were programmed to drive and react more like humans “then fewer crashes will be stopped”, the AP news agency reported.

“Building self-driving cars that drive as well as people do is a big challenge in itself,” the IIHS said in a media statement, quoting research scientist Alexandra Mueller. “But they’d actually need to be better than that to deliver on the promises we’ve all heard.”

 

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A robotics and human factors professor at Duke University, Missy Cummings, told the AP news agency that preventing even one-third of the human-caused crashes is “giving technology too much credit”. 

“Even vehicles with laser, radar and camera sensors don’t always perform flawlessly in all conditions, she told the AP news agency.

“There is a probability that even when all three sensor systems come to bear, that obstacles can be missed,” Cummings told the news wire service. “No driverless car company has been able to do that reliably.”

One of the many challenges facing autonomous cars is the number and of expensive sensors that need to be fitted to each vehicle. Each sensor needs to be crosschecked in milliseconds with data from another monitoring device to avoid errors.

 

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Bad weather and low visibility can hinder the effectiveness of the various sensors. Nevertheless, at one point Ford was so confident about its progress it released photos of an autonomous pizza delivery vehicle in conjunction with the Domino's chain. However, it was only an example of what the future might hold, rather than a real-world experiment.

Meanwhile, some technology providers working on autonomous cars have criticised the IIHS study.

A group representing developers of autonomous vehicles claimed cars of the future will be programmed to prevent a “vastly higher number of potential crash causes, including more complex errors caused by drivers making inadequate or incorrect evasive manouvres,” the Reuters news agency reported.

 

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“Taking those design choices into account, autonomous vehicles could avoid some 72 per cent of crashes,” a group called Partners for Automated Vehicle Education, told the Reuters news agency.

In an interview with the Reuters news agency, the vice president of autonomous vehicle standards at Intel’s Mobileye, Jack Weast, said the industry was establishing a “vast list of likely road scenarios and human behaviour that every driverless car should be able to navigate safely”. 

“Crashes will never be zero until we have no more human drivers on the road,” Mr Weast told the Reuters news agency.

“But (self-driving cars) can combine physical laws with behavioural studies and do much more than a human driver.”

The IIHS is a not-for-profit research and education organisation funded by car insurance companies in North America and regularly conducts studies into road safety and vehicle crashes.

Joshua Dowling

Joshua Dowling has been a motoring journalist for more than 20 years, spending most of that time working for The Sydney Morning Herald (as motoring editor and one of the early members of the Drive team) and News Corp Australia. He joined CarAdvice / Drive in 2018, and has been a World Car of the Year judge for more than 10 years.

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