Information provided by Google in the wake of the Associated Press investigation into crashes involving self-driving cars in California raises an important question: should such vehicles be allowed on public roads?
Since September 2014, when the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) introduced mandatory reporting of incidents involving the permitted cars, four of the 48 cars have been involved in traffic incidents – three Google cars and one Delphi-operated Audi SQ5. Three other companies have California’s autonomous car permits.
Whilst the driving skills of most human drivers plateau at best, autonomous cars, by their very ‘nature’, become better drivers; they also do not develop bad habits, become lazy or arrogant, get distracted or suffer fatigue
According to a Google blog post, its cars have been involved in 11 collisions since its self-driving car programme began in 2009: none was the fault of the cars or the technology, and in some the cars were not in autonomous mode. The US non-profit, Consumer Watchdog, is calling for Google to release the pre-September 2014 reports to support this claim. Certainly the four DMV reports appear to back up the claim that the autonomous car technology was not to blame.
What can we learn from this evidence as presented?
With almost a million autonomous miles driven (1.7 million if you include the cars’ manually-driven miles), and no collisions attributed to the self-driving car technology, Google’s technology appears to work. The incident involving Delphi’s Audi SQ5 was also the fault of the other party (with the Audi reportedly in manual mode); that occurred last year, and not during Delphi’s cross-America autonomous road trip earlier this year, when its Audi SQ5 drove autonomously from Mountain View to Manhattan.
The evidence also supports the oft-cited adage that 90% of collisions are caused by human driver error.
Even allowing for the possibility of some misreporting or data massaging to ward off the harsh reality of statistics, the fact remains that autonomous cars have driven safely alongside other cars for many miles and many years.
That’s great news for the OEMs and suppliers developing semi- and fully-automated cars and trucks; and reassuring for the regulators working out the finer details of how to accommodate automated vehicles alongside those less predictable human-driven cars.
It’s fair to assume that the chances of a collision increase as the miles rack up; but this fails to recognise that the further these cars drive, the better the technology gets. Whilst the driving skills of most human drivers plateau at best, autonomous cars, by their very ‘nature’, become better drivers; they also do not develop bad habits, become lazy or arrogant, get distracted or suffer fatigue.
Should autonomous cars be allowed on public roads? The evidence suggests that human drivers are the problem. To answer that question, we need more time – time to develop more data; and time to develop more trust
The human element here highlights the issues of liability and trust. Insurers and crash investigators will rely on airline-style black box recorders to identify whether man or machine was at fault; that data will also show whether and for how long a human was in control prior to the collision; and it will prevent a sly flick of a switch by a guilty driver seeking to put the car into autonomous mode and blame the technology.
Delphi has indicated that people behave differently when driving near autonomous cars. Should, then, autonomous cars be identifiable, or should they be indistinguishable from manual cars? Should something be used to indicate when the car is in autonomous mode? And, to return to the original question, should autonomous cars be allowed on public roads? The evidence suggests that human drivers are the problem. To answer that question, we need more time – time to develop more data; and time to develop more trust.
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Martin Kahl is Editor, Automotive World
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