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The benefits of autonomous vehicles received another caveat Thursday, when the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety warned that the technology likely will only prevent one-third of all vehicle crashes.
About 94% of all accidents are caused by human error. Despite the continuing progress in the Lidar, sensors, cameras and other navigational tools, the technology can’t anticipate or counteract all driver mistakes.
“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,” says Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice president for research and a coauthor of the study.
The IIHS, a non-profit research and education organization, studied more than 5,000 crashes documented by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, separating out those caused by “sensing and perceiving” errors such as driver distraction, impaired visibility or failing to spot hazards until it was too late.
Researchers also separated crashes caused by human “incapacitation” including drivers impaired by alcohol or drugs, those who fell asleep or drivers with medical problems. Self-driving vehicles can prevent those, the study found.
What the technology can’t prevent are what the institute calls “prediction errors,” such as misjudging the speed of other vehicles, excessive speed for treacherous road conditions and mistaken driver efforts to avoid a crash.
Cicchino cited the example of a bicyclist swerving into the path of an autonomous car that may see the cyclist, but can’t maneuver quickly enough to avoid hitting him.
“Autonomous vehicles need to not only perceive the world around them perfectly, they need to respond to what’s around them as well,” she said.
Just how many crashes are prevented depends a lot on how autonomous vehicles are programmed, Cicchino said.
More crashes would be stopped if autonomous vehicles obey all traffic laws.
But if owners want to travel faster and manufacturers give in to that demand, the technology won’t perform more safely than a human driver would. If the goal is to reduce accidents then the technology must be calibrated to elevate safety over convenience, and that could frustrate some people.
Cicchino also pointed to the fatal 2018 collision of an Uber autonomous vehicle that kille Elaine Herzberg. The self-driving vehicle, despite a human sitting in the driver’s seat, struggled to detect the woman who was walking a bicycle across a main thoroughfare. It failed to swerve out of the way to avoid hitting her.
“Our analysis shows that it will be crucial for designers to prioritize safety over rider preferences if autonomous vehicles are to live up to their promise to be safer than human drivers,” said Alexandra Mueller, IIHS research scientist and who also wrote part of the study.
