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FT editor Raula Khalaf selected his favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The road towards self-driving cars is widened with promise to save people (and each other). Wemo, Google’s Self-Driving Project, Say That “street security stability is unacceptable” and autonomous driving “can save lives”. Elon musk, never leave anyone, D In October, when Tesla unveils cybercabs that autonomous cars are “10 times safer than humans” and “life saves – such a lot of life.”
This is a suitable goal and it seems to be achievable. Above all, people are horrible drivers, isn’t it? In 2022, the last year, which has detailed information, 12.5 people were killed in a motor vehicle accident on the US road. Accordingly National Highway Traffic Protection Administration. Among these casualties, 20 percent died in a speeding accident and 12 percent was categorized as “alcohol-impaired driving fatalities”.
Complete self-driving cars, contrast, do not drink and drive. They do not speed up because they are impatient or late. They are not sleeping. They are not distracted by their phone. Above all, they have 360-degree vision. “You have to keep an eye on the back of your head,” I remember a truck driver was telling me once. Autonomous vehicles actually do.
However, the companies that make vehicles have two problems with their commitment to save lives. The first one is human drivers have set the bar higher than you think. Once you consider how many miles we are driving, suicide is really rare. 100 million vehicles per 100 million miles traveled to the United States were only 1.33 in 2022. It was around 1 for about a decade.
Latest data from Wemo Show Its vehicles were driven only 33mn miles away without any human driver at the end of September last year. This means that it was not just anywhere near enough miles to make statistical comparisons with human drivers in death rates.
It was said that Wemo’s record about the low-prone accident seemed to be encouraging. Organization Data analysis In the same cities, it suggests that people driving in the same cities are less than injury crashes and police-reported crashes. Wemo told me that it already operates the number of serious crashes than we already operate. But autonomous vehicle security expert Phil Copman warned against self -satisfaction. ”We know that computers failed differently than humans,” he told me. “Human drivers failed individually, however [with] Computer, each vehicle has the same driver, so something can happen that fails to all of them “” Also, he says computers may not be drunk but they do not have “common sense”.
It brings us to the second problem. Even if self-driving vehicles companies collect enough data to show their technology living their technology, there are still extensive examples that most people do not only create by making bizarre mistakes of self-driving cars.
Wemo was a taxi that continued Round and round For example, inside a car park circles with a confused passenger inside. Or the time that is one nine two wiimos put up The same pick-up is behind the truck that confuses the software to the streets at some unusual corner. Most seriously, there was a time when there was a pedestrian Throw A General Motors Cruise Cruise Self-driving vehicle by another vehicle, which dragged him down for 20 feet below it. The next review is conducted by the cruise Found “A warning and attentive human driver will be aware that any kind of impact has occurred and does not continue to drive without investigating the situation”.
Copman says it can be wrong, but it is human nature that these national stories are more sticky than statistics in the mind. If your sales point is “our cars are safer drivers than humans”, every time you do something strange in your cars that no human being, your case is lost with the public. On the contrary, the accident that did not happen for your technology rarely produces news.
This may be because Annual survey By the American Automobile Association shows that people are becoming more terrifying about technology over time. Part of the US drivers who say that they believe in self-driving vehicles, they have dropped from 5 percent in 2021 to 5 percent in 2021, and those who say “fear” have increased from 54 to 66 percent.
Self-driving cars companies can say that they want to save lives, but people are going to be more difficult than persuading people to try to try them.
