The Key to Self-Driving Safety: Priority Over Expediency

A new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety finds that autonomous vehicles could only prevent about a third of crashes by virtue of their superior perception and judgment alone. If the cars were to avoid all crashes, their programming would require that safety is prioritized over efficiency. 

"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 5,000 police-reported crashes from the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey," reports the IIHS team. They tested factors like perception, decision making, execution, incapacitation, and avoidability to find out how a world of exclusively self-driving cars would measure up against one with only human drivers. The team found that to promise increased safety in autonomous vehicles, speed and expediency would have to take a back seat to inconvenient safety precautions.