Are Driverless Cars too Safe?

Driverless cars are a hot topic in today’s media with many articles about critiquing the new technology. Unsurprisingly, many people do not feel comfortable letting these vehicles on roadways. A quick google news search outline “bizarre” crashes, hackers tampering and countless other issues. Although, a lesser talked about concern is that these cars might actually be too safe for widespread implementation.

Historically driverless cars have not caused accidents – especially when you compare them to the rate of accidents that occur for human driven vehicles. In particular, the Google car has been in 16 accidents since 2009 all of which were caused by human error. In one instance, a Google car appropriately stopped to wait for a pedestrian to cross. The human driven car behind proceeded to hit the Google car. A new Volvo car encountered similar issues. It had technology that was designed to leave a safe following distance behind the car in front. This following distance was large enough that cars tended to merge into that gap in front and create unsafe situations. Sometimes following the law exactly may create more unsafe situations.

On the other hand, driverless cars might actually be too safe to function normally with human drivers. For instance, the Google car has had issues at four-way stops. Traffic law states that before one can move through a four-way stop one must wait for all other drivers to make a complete stop then proceed through the intersection. Unlike human drivers, computer controlled cars have infinite patience and explicitly follow the rules of the road. As one can imagine, this poses a threat in situations like these because a computer can wait indefinitely if there isn’t a “safe” opening. Human drivers tend to inch forward so the Google car was never able to pass through.

Many people believe the real issue is that human drivers behave unpredictably and do not follow the rules of the road. This poses a challenge for driverless car designers because they need to blend their technology to match normal driving behavior while following the law. Some techniques have been implemented already to help with this. The Google car now inches forward at stop signs to mimic other drivers. By doing this humans are more likely to stop and let the other car go through.

Hopefully new designs will emerge to the point that driverless cars are non-distinguishable from human driven cars - but not to the point that they frequently get into accidents. Great strides have already been made so it’s a matter of time before these cars become commonplace.

Written by Kyra Pastore

The New York Times’ article Google’s Driverless Car Runs into Problems… was used as a source. (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/technology/personaltech/google-says-its-not-the-driverless-cars-fault-its-other-drivers.html?referrer=)