Engineering news
Research from the RAND Corporation called ‘The Enemy of the Good: Estimating the cost of waiting for nearly perfect autonomous vehicles’ estimated road deaths across hundreds of different plausible futures. It suggests that rolling out autonomous vehicles that are just 10% better than current American drivers could prevent thousands of fatalities over the next fifteen years, compared to waiting until they are 75% or 90% better.
“Our work suggests that it is sensible to allow autonomous vehicles on America’s roads when they are judged to be just moderately safer than having a person behind the wheel,” said Nidhi Kaira, a co-author of the study.
“If we wait until these vehicles are nearly perfect, our research suggests the cost will be many thousands of needless vehicle crash deaths caused by human mistakes,” she said. “It’s the very definition of perfect being the enemy of good.”
However, introducing the vehicles too early could actually end up setting back their widespread adoption, according to Gustav Markkula, an associate professor at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds who was not involved in the research. “There might be some hard to overlook effects if it’s being rolled out too soon, even if on average it causes accidents less often than humans,” he told Professional Engineering. “If it starts causing accidents in new ways then that could be a cause of very low human acceptance of the technology.”
David Groves, a co-author on the report, admitted this could be an issue, but said that putting self-driving cars in the real world would lead to rapid improvements not currently possible. “If we can accept that early-self driving cars will make some mistakes – but fewer than human drivers – developers can use early deployment to more rapidly improve self-driving technology, even as their vehicles save lives,” he said.
Oliver Carsten, a professor of transport safety at Leeds, questioned the ethics of bringing in driverless cars before they’re ready. “I can’t see how it is morally justifiable to use humans as guinea pigs in a real-world experiment in which we learn how to make AVs safe,” he told PE. “We have the knowledge to make automated vehicles safe, and we should exploit that knowledge to ensure that they are safe in real-world operation.”
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.