Self-Driving Cars More Prone to Accidents

As interest in self-driving cars accelerates, so have questions about their safety and reliability. However, accidents with self-driving cars have mostly involved other cars crashing into them.

Human drivers were at fault each time there was a crash involving a self-driving vehicle, a report from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute found. The report released Thursday surveyed autonomous cars produced by Delphi, Google and Volkswagen (including Audi).

The researchers, Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak, note the limitations, acknowledging their confidence levels could invalidate the overall finding of higher accident rates for self-driving cars. And while the injury rate for human-operated cars was 1.02 per million miles driven, for driverless cars it was 3.29. Self-driving cars have only driven about 1.2 million miles total; America drives its regular cars about 3 trillion miles a year.

Despite limitations of the study, “A Preliminary Analysis of Real-World Crashes Involving Self-Driving Vehicles”, it reached a few real conclusions.

Because of the statistical uncertainty that comes with comparing a census of autonomous vehicle crashes with a sample of conventional vehicle crashes, the researchers couldn’t say for sure that self driving vehicles are more likely to be involved in crashes than conventional cars.

Most of the self-driving vehicle testing takes place in California.

That said, a number of factors also make the number of self-driving accidents lower than it would be under normal conditions.

The self-driving cars were tested in temperate regions of the United States where snow and ice, which self-driving cars aren’t prepared to deal with yet, are rarely a factor. The cars by Audi and Delphi were driven on highways, and Google’s through the suburb of Mountain View.

Whoa. Self-driving cars are starting to look really unbelievable. 28 percent of conventional vehicle crashes resulted in a non-fatal injury; only 18.2 percent of autonomous vehicle crashes resulted in the same kind of injury.

Based on narratives supplied in the crash descriptions for the crashes occurring in autonomous mode, the self-driving vehicles do not appear to be at fault in any of the crashes that have occurred to date.