AVs Could Prevent 1/3 of Crashes, Insurance Study Finds

Autonomous vehicles might only prevent a third of crashes if automated systems drive too much like people, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported. “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, vice president-research. A national survey of police-reported crashes gave driver error as the final failure in the chain of events leading to more than nine of 10 crashes, and IIHS said Thursday a third of those were the result of mistakes that AVs would be expected to avoid “simply because they have more accurate perception than human drivers and aren’t vulnerable to incapacitation.” To avoid the other two-thirds, they would need to be specifically programmed to prioritize safety over speed and convenience, it said. “Building self-driving cars that drive as well as people do is a big challenge in itself,” said Research Scientist Alexandra Mueller. Such cars need to be “be better than that to deliver on the promises we’ve all heard.”