Google is teaching its self-driving cars “to drive more cautiously around”

For a new study, the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute took the crash records of three self-driving vehicles now on U.S. roads-Google, Audi, and Delphi-and compared those to the crash records of all vehicles on USA roads in 2013.

The authors note two important caveats.

Another preliminary finding is he can not rule out the possibility that the actual crash rates for self driving vehicles are lower than for conventional vehicles. The data set for the self-driving cars is somewhere in the range of 0.0000002 times the size of the data set for manually driven cars, for one thing. The four reported injuries are less severe than the rate of severe injuries reported for conventional vehicles. All of these involved Google vehicles (which have been undergoing testing for much longer) but most importantly, the self-driving cars were not at fault in any of the accidents. In a recent Google+ post, it stated that the activity gave the sensors and software an edge in “recognizing children in all their unique shapes and sizes, even when they’re in odd costumes”.

Google says its self-driving cars are actively learning to recognize potentially unsafe situations, even while the cars are parked.

When it comes to cars, they’re often carrying the most precious of cargo in the backseat – our children. According to the update the Google cars were taught to be more kid friendly on Halloween. By far, the largest result of autonomous vehicle crashes was property damage, at 81.8 percent.

What the analysis did find, however, was that every crash an autonomous vehicle was in was caused by a driver of a conventional auto.

And, said an abstract for the study, “the overall severity of crash-related injuries involving self-driving vehicles has been lower than for conventional vehicles”. Also, self-driving cars have yet to be tested in unsafe driving conditions, such as in the snow.

But given the technology’s still early-stage development, is there any data to show how safe self-driving cars are when running in autonomous mode?

Ever since 2009, Google’s robotic automobiles have covered a total of 2.2 million miles, while been manually driven or autonomously driven, the equivalent of 10,000-15,000 autonomous miles on a weekly basis.

A key selling point for self-driving vehicles is that they should be safer than conventional vehicles.