Driverless cars have been touted as a possible solution to road traffic accidents, with research previously suggesting that up to 90 per cent of accidents could be avoided. A new study finds that, in reality, autonomous vehicles may only reduce accidents by a third, unless the AI driving style is optimised for safety rather than speed or convenience.

 

Currently, mistakes made by the driver play at least some role in 9 out of 10 crashes, according to a national survey of police-reported crashes across the US. If autonomous vehicles are designed to drive too much like people, their safety benefits will not be as pronounced, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) said.

 

“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,” said Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice-president for research and a co-author of the study. "Building self-driving cars that drive as well as people do is a big challenge in itself,” said IIHS researcher Alexandra Mueller, lead author of the study. “But they’d actually need to be better than that to deliver on the promises we’ve all heard.” 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, the IIHS examined more than 5,000 police-reported crashes from the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey.

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