Autonomous Cars Are Safer Drivers Than You (Maybe)

Autonomous cars are better drivers than most humans, according to a new study.

Nextcar Bug art Researchers at Virginia Tech take plant that self-driving cars are involved in 1.6 major accidents per one million miles, compared to 2.5 for cars driven by humans.

The differences were fifty-fifty greater with less-serious crashes. In so-called "level two" crashes, cocky-driving cars retained an incidence rate of 1.6 per 1000000 miles. For cars with humans, that number jumped to three.three. On a "level 3" crash, which is viewed equally 1 with minimal damage, self-driving cars had an blow rate of 5.6, compared to 14.4 for regular cars.

While the written report seems to evidence that democratic cars are safer than traditional vehicles, there are some caveats to consider. For 1, the report was commissioned by Google, which is developing a cocky-driving car. But researchers also acknowledge that there is express testing data and different state laws may affect the figures. What's more, as time goes on, information technology'due south possible that those incidents will ascension.

"Current data suggest that self-driving cars may take low rates of more-astringent crashes (Level 1 and Level 2 crashes) when compared to national rates or to rates from naturalistic data sets, but there is currently likewise much uncertainty in self-driving rates to draw this conclusion with strong confidence," the researchers best-selling in their findings.

That said, the researchers noted that unlike states have varying requirements for how to report an accident. Since "many crashes go unreported," the terminal tally could be much higher for actual accidents across the U.S.

"Estimates of unreported rates of crashes have ranged from equally little every bit xv.4 pct to as much every bit 59.7 percent," the researchers said. "The result is that the electric current national crash charge per unit is substantially a low estimate of the bodily crash rate."

So, the future looks brighter (and safer) for America's roads, according to Virginia Tech. Only as all the announcements at CES show, truly self-driving probably won't hitting the roads for another few years.