You've probably seen some stories about automated, driverless cars getting into accidents on city streets, where the vehicles are currently in limited operation as taxis.
But what if it turns out that self-driving cars are actually FAR safer than human drivers?
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Google-owned "Waymo," which operates self-driving taxis in cities like San Francisco, Phoenix, and here in L.A., released new research Wednesday claiming that their automated cars were roughly 85% safer than humans behind the wheel - Do you believe them?
Carol Flannagan, directs the University of Michigan Center for the Management of Information for Safe and Sustainable Transportation, she tells KNX News' chief correspondent Charles Feldman the data is convincing.
"What I can say is the results are certainly the strongest evidence that I've seen that automated vehicles get into fewer crashes than human drivers," as long as you broadly define 'crashes,' said Flannagan.
She said more critical, though, than the operational definition of 'crash' when interpreting the data, is how they use it to frame what they mean by the word 'safe' - Flannagan said that can get a bit tricky.
Why is it tricky? While to the average person, safe means you get in the car, are you going to get from point A to point B without going over to point C...emergency room, Flannagan said, "The first thing you would want to happen is before they're on the road, is saying, yes, they're safer is to say that they get in fewer crashes. But knowing that they get into fewer crashes in the broad doesn't really tell us for sure that it's fewer, let's say, 'injury' crashes....So that word safe means something I think, kind of stronger."
Regardless, Flannagan said the paper had 'reasonable sort of honest things' in it, and it's a significant milestone on the pathway to robot cars being safer than humans.
When asked if she would get into a Waymo driverless taxi herself, she said yes. When adding the caveat "without any fear," Flannagan hesitated before saying, "I would definitely get in it, for a variety of reasons, probably that, you know, it's intriguing."
She did say if you are a risk-averse person, you might want to wait until the technology advances and the data are more conclusive.
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