It turns out this is a more complicated question than you might think.
If a chorus of wide-eyed boosters and enthralled journalists are to be believed, self-driving cars from companies like Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox can bring about road safety nirvana — if only US regulators would get out of their way.
Waymo has said that the for-hire autonomous vehicles it operates in several cities are “already making roads safer,” an assertion echoed by many media outlets. Since “robotaxis have fewer accidents than human drivers,” the Economist concluded, “they are almost certainly saving lives.” By implication, regulations that hinder AV deployments are effectively killing people. A neurosurgeon made a similar argument in a recent New York Times op-ed, writing that “there is a public health imperative” to expand robotaxis as quickly as possible.
A deus ex machina solution for crashes is a tantalizing prospect in the US, where residents are several times more likely to die in a collision than those in other rich countries.
But don’t pop the champagne just yet. In fact, don’t even take the bottle out of the fridge.
I’ve been writing and thinking about car safety since before Waymo was offering robotaxi service at all. In researching this piece, I spoke to many independent transportation and technology researchers about what we know and don’t know about the industry’s safety record thus far. Contrary to prevailing narratives, these experts are unconvinced that today’s self-driving cars are less crash-prone than those operated by humans. And even if robotaxis do end up being safer on individual trips, that doesn’t necessarily mean that America’s roadway body count will decline.
It’s time for a reality check about the safety of self-driving cars.
This is a long story and it considers the question from many different angles and weighing in multiple factors. Such as: The error rate of humans versus that of robotaxis, the insufficiency of the data we have so far, the potential for a lot more vehicle miles driven wiping out any gains made from the reduction in crash rates, and the ability of better road safety policies and construction practices to vastly improve the situation now. The point here is that the question is bigger than “is an autonomous vehicle safer than a human-driven vehicle”, and we should take that into account before we make decisions that will be hard to modify or undo later. Go read the rest. And then read this more recent story about a Waymo that needed to be moved out of the way of emergency responders in Austin after that recent mass shooting at a bar. There are a couple of interesting bits in there that I’ll write about later, but for now I just wanted to note it for this post.