Self-driving cars still aren’t safe

Audi has been testing Level 3 autonomous driving in the A8L. Photo: Audi

As the likes of Audi work toward fully autonomous vehicles, a survey has found that self-driving cars could likely only prevent a third of all US road crashes.

The study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a research group financed by U.S. insurers, found the remaining crashes were caused by mistakes that self-driving systems are not equipped to handle any better than human drivers.

“It’s likely that fully self-driving cars will eventually identify hazards better than people, but we found that this alone would not prevent the bulk of crashes,” said Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice-president for research and a co-author of the study.

Conventional thinking has it that self-driving vehicles could one day make crashes a thing of the past. The reality is not that simple. According to a national survey of police-reported crashes, driver error is the final failure in the chain of events leading to more than 9 out of 10 crashes.

But the Institute’s analysis suggests that only about a third of those crashes were the result of mistakes that automated vehicles would be expected to avoid simply because they have more accurate perception than human drivers and aren’t vulnerable to incapacitation. To avoid the other two-thirds, they would need to be specifically programmed to prioritise safety over speed and convenience.

“Building self-driving cars that drive as well as people do is a big challenge in itself,” said IIHS Research Scientist Alexandra Mueller, lead author of the study.

“But they’d actually need to be better than that to deliver on the promises we’ve all heard.”

To estimate how many crashes might continue to occur if self-driving cars are designed to make the same decisions about risk that humans do, IIHS researchers examined more than 5000 police-reported crashes from the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey.

This sample is representative of crashes across the US in which at least one vehicle was towed away, and emergency medical services were called to the scene.

 The study also comes just days after surveillance footage captured the moment a Tesla vehicle, allegedly operating on Autopilot, crashed into an overturned truck in Taiwan.

CCTV cameras captured the Tesla Model 3 failing to stop for an overturned truck and slamming right into it on a highway. The driver said his car was in Autopilot mode and travelling at around 110km/h. He told emergency first responders that it did not have the Full Self-Driving feature engaged. 

Tesla offers two types of semi-autonomous technology with its electric cars: Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. Autopilot enables the car to steer, accelerate and brake automatically for other vehicles and pedestrians within its lane.

Full Self-Driving is more advanced and also offers additional features like Navigate on Autopilot, Auto Lane Change, Autopark, Summon, and Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control.