Driverless cars are mostly safer than humans – but worse at turns

One of the most important accident research but suggests self-driving cars could also be safer than human drivers in routine circumstances – but it additionally reveals the know-how struggles extra than humans throughout low-light situations and when performing turns.

The findings come at a time when autonomous autos are already driving in a number of US cities. The GM-owned firm Cruise is attempting to restart driverless automotive testing after a pedestrian-dragging incident in March led California to droop its working allow. Meanwhile, Google spin-off Waymo has been regularly increasing robotaxi operations in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.

“It is important to improve the safety of autonomous vehicles under dawn and dusk or turning conditions,” says Shengxuan Ding at the University of Central Florida. “Key strategies include enhancing weather and lighting sensors and effectively integrating sensor data.”

Ding and his colleague Mohamed Abdel-Aty, additionally at the University of Central Florida, pulled collectively information on 2100 accidents from California and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) involving autos geared up with some stage of automated self-driving or driver help applied sciences. They additionally gathered information on extra than 35,000 accidents involving unassisted human drivers.

Next, they used a statistical matching technique to search out pairs of accidents that occurred beneath related circumstances, with shared elements similar to highway situations, climate, time of day and whether or not the incident happened at an intersection or on a straight highway. They targeted this matching evaluation on 548 self-driving automotive crashes reported in California – excluding much less automated autos that solely have driver help techniques.

The general outcomes counsel autonomous autos “generally demonstrate better safety in most scenarios”, says Abdel-Aty. But the evaluation additionally discovered self-driving cars had a crash threat 5 instances as nice as human drivers when working at daybreak and nightfall, together with virtually double the accident charge of human drivers when making turns.

One analysis roadblock is the “autonomous vehicle accident database is still small and limited”, says Abdel-Aty. He and Ding described the necessity for “enhanced autonomous vehicle accident reporting” – a serious caveat echoed by impartial consultants.

“I think it is an interesting but extremely preliminary step towards measuring autonomous vehicle safety,” says Missy Cummings at George Mason University in Virginia. She described the numbers of self-driving automotive crashes as being “so low that no sweeping conclusions can be made” in regards to the security efficiency of such applied sciences – and warned of biased reporting from self-driving automotive firms. During her time at NHTSA, says Cummings, video footage of incidents didn’t at all times match firms’ narratives, which tended to color human drivers as those at fault. “When I saw actual videos, the story was very different,” she says.

Some crashes don’t get reported to the police in the event that they solely contain minor fender benders, and so any comparisons of autonomous automobile crashes versus human driver crashes must account for that issue, says Eric Teoh at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Virginia. His 2017 examine of Google’s early checks of self-driving cars discovered simply three out of 10 particular crashes made it into police studies.

“Both California and NHTSA do not require comprehensive data reporting for autonomous vehicle testing and deployment,” says Junfeng Zhao at Arizona State University. “Autonomous vehicles – particularly robotaxis – often operate in particular areas and environments, making it difficult to generalise findings.”