I have some bad news: Certainly you are definitely Worse driver than you think.
Humans are driving attention. they Drown. they Pay anger. And worse than all of this, they lead a disability Often more than should. Even when we shoot all cylinders, our brains that are adapted in the Stone Age do not coincide with the speed and complexity of high -speed driving. There as a 2.5 seconds delayed Between what we realize and the extent of the speed that we can respond in a car that travels 60 miles per hour, which means that the car will travel to the equivalent of the length of the basketball field before its driver can hit the brakes.
The result of this human supernatural is blood in the streets. Almost 1.2 million people He dies in road accidents The global level every year, enough to fill nine jumbo aircraft every day. Here in the United States, the government The estimates were 39,345 traffic deaths in 2024Which adds up to its value in the bus who perish every 12 hours.
The good news is that there are much better drivers coming online, and they have everything that human drivers do not do: they do not need to sleep. Do not get angry. Do not drink. Their brains can easily deal with high -speed decisions.
The will of ordinary American adults About three Years From their lives they lead. If the robots can take the wheel instead, consider all Netflix offers that we can broadcast instead.
But the true benefit of the self -leadership revolution will be in a rescue life. The new data from the independent vehicle company indicates that these savings can be really very great.
in Study of the counterparts It is scheduled to be published in the magazine Prevention of traffic infectionWaymo analyzed the safety performance of its independent vehicles for 56.7 million miles paid in Austin, Los Angeles, Phenix and San Francisco – All without Human safety driver is present to take a wheel in the event of an emergency. Then they compared these data to the integrity of human leadership over the same number of miles that it moves on the same type of road.
The results of the study, almost the biggest and most comprehensive research on the safety of self -driving cars so far have been launched.
A key category in leadership safety
Compared to human drivers, self -driving cars were self -driving:
- Less than 81 percent of air transport accidents
- 85 percent less of accidents with serious injuries or the worst suspect
- 96 per cent is less than injury accidents at intersections (primarily because Waymo discovers other cars that operate red lights faster than humans)
- 92 percent is less than accidents that involve pedestrian injuries.
If the fleet of the model car driven by a person covered the same 56.7 million miles, Waymo researchers would have led to an estimated 181 additional injury accidents, 78 additional accidents of airbags, and 11 additional accidents for the injury.
But the numbers really get the back of the eye when extending this data through everything 3.3 trillion miles vehicle Payed by humans in the United States in a typical year. The background accounts indicate that if the reduction of the 85 percent that was seen in serious accidents applies to deadly accidents-which is a big thing if it is, because the study had a very few fatal events-we will provide about 34,000 people per year. This is five times the number of Americans who He died in the Iraqi wars and Afghanistan together.
Do not object to progress
Of course, there are a lot of warnings to study Waymo and more obstacles before we can achieve anything like what is shown above.
Partially because serious injury accidents are very rare (fortunately), up to 56.7 million miles are not long enough for researchers to really make sure that such incidents will often occur with robot drivers, so more data will be needed there. Waymo cars were also largely driven in warm sunny sites, working in geographical areas that were largely assigned by the company. It is not sure how they can do, let’s say, Boston’s snow streets in the winter.
This is also a study run by the company, although it was reviewed by external experts. Even if we decide to enter into artificial intelligence drivers, the production of enough self -ruling cars to start replacing cars and trucks driven by man will be an enormous task, at the very least.
However, the data looks very good, and the number of deaths on our methods is so high that I claim to slow independent vehicles in reality. There is a danger, and this is exactly what will happen.
Often the audience focuses on unusualand external Events containing self -driving cars, while the massacre that occurs thanks to human drivers on a daily basis is simply treated as a background. (This is an example of two common psychological biases: Bias AvailabilityWhich makes us judge the risks through external events that easily jump into mind, and Neglecting the foundation rateWhere we ignore the basic frequency of events.) This misunderstanding is something that I often see in news coverage and consumption, and it is one of the reasons that prompted that good news began.
The result is that public opinion He was turning against Self -driving cars in recent years, to the extent that saboteurs They attacked Independent vehicles on the street. And of course, given this almost 5 million Americans Earn their livelihood primarily through driving, any wide -ranging movement to self -driving vehicles would bring great economic turmoil.
However, 34,000 people were rescued on an annual basis will represent enormous progress. Perhaps, after about 100 years of trying, it’s time to give something else a chance behind the steering wheel.
A copy of this story originally appeared in the good newsletter. Subscribe here!
Correction, May 5, 10:40 am Each time: The previous version of this post has erred, as autonomous driving cars in Waymo had 96 percent less than the intersections at intersections.
