Self-Driving Cars Versus The Most Dangerous Driving Month Of The Year

Which month of the year is considered the most dangerous for drivers?

Give this question a moment of somber consideration.

There are certainly a lot of factors to take into account. Maybe winter months that involve inclement weather are the most dangerous due to having to contend with rain, snow, and otherwise adverse roadway conditions. Or perhaps the onerous months are when people tend to drink and drive, such as around the holidays.

Get ready for the answer.

Statistics suggest that in the United States the month of September is annually the worst in terms of the number of driving-related fatalities per billion miles driven. So, the answer is September is the most dangerous month for drivers, assuming you are willing to focus on traffic-related deaths versus some other metrics such as the number of car crash injuries or other estimates entailing car accidents.

What makes September snare the highest car-related fatality rate?

Nobody can say for sure, but there is plenty of reasoned speculation involved.

Perhaps the least obvious facet and yet glaringly apparent once you think about it is the celebration of Labor Day during the month of September. I’d wager that you don’t necessarily associate September with Labor Day, at least not to the same degree that you align New Year’s with January or the celebrating of our nation’s independence in July. Anyway, Labor Day weekend can certainly entail lots of partying and drinking, along with an upsurge in driving to get too celebratory destinations, all of which parlays into the fatalities via automobile driving during September.

Some assert that another key element is that the summer weather usually continues into September and therefore people are willing to go for a drive, more so than once the winter weather starts to appear. Yet another plausible explanation involves the aspect that the days begin to become shorter due to the evening darkness settling in at earlier and earlier hours. People generally drive worse in nighttime conditions, not being able to see the road as clearly and for other associated reasons.

An especially convincing though unproven contention is that people are apt to drive more as a result of schools getting underway, including that there are newly sparked time-based pressures that emerge each September. In brief, the notion is that people get stressed out by having to dovetail their dropping off children at school and picking them up at the end of the school day, which gets intermingled into driving to and from work. This creates heightened pressures to drive fast and meet demanding timetables. All of this then gets stirred into a boiling pot of car traffic and the next thing you know, there are lots of car crashes and related fatalities.

Bottom-line is to please be extra careful when driving during September.

One future aspect to consider involves the gradual advent of AI-based true self-driving cars.

This raises an intriguing question: Will the emergence of AI-based true self-driving cars eliminate the role of September or essentially any month from being a most dangerous driving time, perhaps due to the safety aspects expected for self-driving car driving?

Let’s unpack the matter and see.

Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some point out, see my indication at this link here).

Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).

For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Self-Driving Cars And Most Dangerous Driving Months

For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.

All occupants will be passengers.

The AI is doing the driving.

Some pundits are apt to say that once there are self-driving cars on our roadways, you can forget about the per-month fatalities rates about driving because the AI is doing the driving rather than humans. We all know that humans exhibit bad driving behaviors, encompassing driving while intoxicated, driving while distracted, and so on. The AI is not going to drive drunk, it won’t be watching the latest cat videos, and generally can be assumed to be fully attentive to the driving task.

As such, in theory, traffic will be much safer overall and the number of car crashes will drop sharply. Some keep saying we will reach a point of zero fatalities. My reaction is that zero fatalities have a zero chance of happening. There are still going to be car crashes, and we have to openly toss aside a utopian fantasy that the number of car fatalities will go to zero.

One reason to expect car crashes to occur will be the realistic perspective that there are going to be human-driven cars intermixing with self-driving cars. Forget about the pie-in-the-sky idea that we will suddenly have only self-driving cars on our roadways and that all human driving will be banned or otherwise expunged off the planet.

There are about 250 million conventional cars in the U.S. alone, and those vehicles are not going to disappear overnight once self-driving cars emerge. Also, many drivers are going to fight tooth-and-nail to keep driving, despite any pleadings to get them to give up the privilege (it is going to be quite an ugly battle over whether humans can still drive or perhaps by government decree no longer be allowed to do so).

This overall discussion is crucial to the question about the fatalities per month aspects.

If you believe that magically there will exclusively be self-driving cars and absolutely no human-driven cars, this would seem to imply that all months will be equal in terms of driving. You might then think that all months would come out to the same number of potential fatalities.

Not quite.

Assuming that self-driving cars will rarely get into car accidents in such a scenario, the number of fatalities is going to logically be at rock bottom, fortunately so. That being the case, there is still the matter of the number of miles driven, namely that assuming there is some relatively consistent rate of fatalities, albeit much less than when only humans were driving, the rate nonetheless would presumably be applied to the number of miles being driven (and, thus, whichever months had the most driving would tend to have a higher raw number of actual fatality incidents).

In that use case, it could be that September remains the most dangerous driving month, but the crucial caveat is that it would be a huge drop in the count of fatalities and thus a lot of lives “saved” (deaths averted) that would otherwise have been lost. Interestingly, the month with the highest number of driven miles historically tends to be July, and using the aforementioned logic, it possibly could be that July would become the most dangerous driving month rather than September.

There is a fly in the ointment on all of this.

Returning to the earlier point that we are going to have an intermixing of human-driven cars and self-driving cars, this is a serious matter worthy of added attention.

As self-driving cars start to become prevalent, how will human drivers react to this phenomenon?

One argument is that human drivers will be inspired to become better drivers, doing so as guided or politely nudged by self-driving cars and AI driving behaviors.

Allow me to elaborate.

Right now, we all tend to react to other human drivers. Someone rudely cuts you off in traffic, and this causes you to get steamed, prodding you to then take out your anger on other drivers. All it takes is one jerk driver to initiate a cascading sense of foul driving in a dominos kind of way. By reducing the number of idiot drivers that provoke road rage reactions, the AI driving systems might indirectly encourage driving civil discourse.

Notice that it isn’t as though the AI is telling human drivers nearby to be better drivers. Instead, the absence of doing untoward driving tactics is tantamount to saying something akin to dance with me. The usual tit-for-tat that occurs daily on our streets and highways is turned on its head. Whereas the tit-for-tat is dominated by eye-for-an-eye behaviors today, it could become a contagion of good driving, everyone being courteous and generous toward each other.

Gradually, there will be fewer and fewer human drivers on the roads and the number of self-driving cars will incrementally rise over time. Eventually, the proportion of human drivers in traffic versus the AI driving systems will be reversed such that the self-driving cars are predominant. Thus, in theory, driving safety is getting enhanced by the higher proportion of self-driving cars involved, and simultaneously a lessening of tit-for-tat bad driving takes place.

Some though believe that human drivers might be irked and resort to undesirable driving as a result of all those self-driving cars.

First, human drivers might realize that they can trick the self-driving cars (this is already occurring). If the AI driving systems are programmed to back down from any traffic challenges by other cars, human drivers that are devious will undoubtedly take advantage of this loophole. When you want to cut in traffic, in today’s driving you have to play a game of cat-and-mouse with other cars to let you into their lane. Assuming that AI self-driving cars aren’t going to play such games, and will immediately allow your car into their lane, the human drivers will be happy to do this all day long.

Second, human drivers might become exasperated at self-driving cars and those darned AI driving systems. Assuming that the AI is programmed to always drive at the legally posted speeds, you can bet that human drivers are not going to like sitting behind a self-driving car going 25 miles per hour down a quiet street that the humans prefer to drive at 35 miles per hour. As such, the human drivers will try to sneak around self-driving cars, undertaking highly dangerous driving stunts to do so.

Third, some human drivers might relish undercutting AI driving systems. In a sense of hating robots and the emerging AI, there will be human drivers that purposely try to shake-up the self-driving cars. These nefarious drivers will veer toward self-driving cars to get the AI to weave or make a sudden maneuver to avoid what appears to be an impending car crash. Human drivers of this ilk will possibly perceive this kind of activity as a means of showing the world that allowing AI to drive is fundamentally wrong and that humanity needs to take back the steering wheel from those infuriating robots, as it were.

What this all adds up to is that the human drivers that are still on the roadways might become more dangerous drivers than we have today, and therefore push up the car crash rates, despite there being less human drivers all told.

You could say it is an irrational form of induced demand, consisting of today’s otherwise suppressed bad driving that gets unleashed as the advent of self-driving cars arises.

Would the month of September still be the most dangerous driving month?

It is hard to say, and one supposes that it could still hold the sordid title depending upon the other earlier speculated underlying basis for why September is so drivingly wanton.

Conclusion

This discussion has covered how human drivers might respond to the emergence of self-driving cars.

The odds are that the AI driving systems will adapt too, either via the efforts of human AI-developers that reprogram the AI and/or potentially via the use of Machine Learning (ML) or Deep Learning (DL) whereby the AI self-adjusts to the prevailing traffic conditions.

An open question that faces the self-driving industry today is whether to have the AI try to be a firmer driver and act somewhat like human drivers do when confronting other drivers. This could entail the AI opting to veer toward human drivers as though the AI is telegraphing that it is willing to play hardball while in traffic.

Do as humans do, warts and all.

Some assert that this makes perfectly good sense. If the AI is supposed to be driving as humans do, it ought to drive in the aggressive and in-your-face ways that human drivers sometimes drive. This logic though causes many authorities to get shivers and shudder at the thought that we are replacing road rage humans with the AI equivalent type of driving systems. One hopes that the AI will stand above the lowest common dominator of human driving, seeking to drive respectfully that we strive for humans to try and adroitly achieve.

While all of this will eventually get figured out, you still need to gravely keep in mind that September is a dangerous driving month. Drive safely and let’s all together see if we can transform September to become the safest driving month, showcasing just the kind of outstanding feats that humans can accomplish.

That will show the AI who’s the boss.