However, the circumstances of the accidents differ in a number of ways, and the accident rates calculated are far from a flawless indicator of the relative safety of self-driving and conventional cars. The all-electric, high-powered Tesla recently downloaded a few driverless features to its cars. In addition, 73 percent of the crashes involving an autonomous vehicle happened when the auto was going 5 miles per hour or less, or while the auto was stopped. It’s made of carbon fiber, so it’s a relatively lightweight vehicle. The study showed that self-driving vehicles were actually involved in more accidents on average, per million miles traveled, than their conventional forebears.
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Vehicle manufacturers are on their way to making the “auto” in “automobile” literal, in that the vehicle will be able to drive itself, without any input from the person sitting behind the wheel, aka the-individual-previously-known-as-the-driver. But a study published this week by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute suggests the exact opposite, saying that “the current best estimate is that self-driving vehicles have a higher crash rate per million miles traveled than conventional vehicles”.
The crash reports, along with other public data released by Google, Delphi and Audi, were then compared to the safety records for all conventional vehicles in the U.S.in 2013. They also note that the severity of the crashes that involved driverless cars tended to be lower. “Therefore, their exposure has not yet been representative of the exposure for conventional vehicles”.
So even if you might dispute the overall crash rate for human-operated vs. autonomous cars based on the reporting rate, the data proves something that’s kind of irrefutable: Humans driving cars are much more likely to cause property damage or hit other humans, causing injury or death.
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Of course there are tons of caveats here. And self-driving vehicles aren’t subjected to the same driving situations as human-operated ones: None of the autonomous cars are now being tested in places that have wintry weather, for example. But the authors caution that driverless cars have very limited total mileage so far – just 1.2 million miles – compared with 3 trillion miles for conventional cars. Today, Bosch announced a “pedestrian avoidance” technology which it wants to have in all cars by 2018.
