Science & Technology

How safe can a driverless car actually be ?

By T.K. Randall
January 19, 2015 ·  27 comments

Google has made significant progress in developing driverless vehicles. Image Credit: Google / YouTube The idea of sitting back and relaxing while your car drives itself along through the city streets might seem like something out of a science fiction movie, but as advances in driverless car technology push the practicality of such a concept ever further towards reality it may not be long before such a scenario becomes commonplace.

The biggest question on everyone's lips however is just how safe a self-driving car actually is - can you trust a computer to navigate the plethora of hazards that a human driver faces on a daily basis ?

According to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan, driverless cars will never be as safe as the best human drivers and even the most sophisticated of computers will never be able to anticipate or prevent every fatal accident.Even if the car's ability to drive itself was perfect, technical faults with the vehicle or sudden road hazards could put the computer in a position where it would be impossible to avoid an accident.

"The expectation of zero fatalities with self-driving vehicles is not realistic," wrote study authors Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle. "It is not a foregone conclusion that a self-driving vehicle would ever perform more safely than an experienced, middle-aged driver."

Nonetheless, it has been predicted that driverless car technology could still go a long way to reducing many of the 1.2 million people killed on roads across the planet each year.

Source: Telegraph | Comments (27)

Tags: Driverless Car