We have been hearing a lot about self-driving cars lately. One of the questions that we continued to have in mind with regard to the self-driving cars is s that could they ever become a reality, given our chaotic roads and insane drivers?
Self-driving cars lot safer.
Image source: Pixabay.com
The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which was commissioned by Google, released a very interesting report recently. According to this report, self-driving cars are safer than conventional cars. This indicates that self-driving cars are ready to become part of our daily life sooner or later.
The research report from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, “Automated Vehicle Crash Rate Comparison Using Naturalistic Data,” after examining national crash data and the statistics from naturalistic driving studies seems to clear the air. The report is very much in favor of self-driving cars.
According to this study, there were lesser crashes in the case of self-driving cars when compared to conventional cars driven by human drivers. The report conducted the study with over fifty self-driving cars from Google with 1.3 million miles covering Texas and California. These 1.3 million miles were covered in self-driving/autonomous mode. Totally 17 crashes have been reported for a period of six years. The report also notes that these crashes were not caused due to the fault of the self-driving cars but there were other external factors.
For every million miles, self-driving cars logged 3.2 crashes. When it came to cars with human drivers, the reports have a figure of 4.2 crashes per million miles. The report was standardized based on the severity of the crashes and the report also accounted for the crashes that went unreported to the police. The crash rates were found to be higher for conventional vehicles when the figures were calculated for all severity levels too, indicating self-driving cars are safer regardless of the severity of the crashes.
Aggressive researches are underway in perfecting the technology that supports self-driving vehicles to make these vehicles part of our regular transportation system. The report throws in a dash of optimism in this matter.
By perfecting the self-driving technology, we could make our roads lot safer than what they are now. Moreover, it will also help aged people and differently abled people to move around more easily without having to depend on expensive taxi services or on other family members that grudgingly drive them around.
Gunning the project Google says that “time spent commuting could be time spent doing what you want to do.” Moreover, Google states that the number of accidents resulting due to human errors could be dramatically reduced.
Google’s self-driven cars come with highly powerful sensors, which according to the company could sense objects that are two football fields. Self-driving cars soon to become the most preferred mode of transportation in all cities across the globe. It will not be surprising to see these self-driving cars go one step further and run simple errands such as making deliveries, collecting goods under preset routes.
