14 Interesting Facts About Self Driving Cars
Do you know the origin of self-driving cars or how many miles these vehicles have traveled? Here are three interesting facts about the history of self-driving cars and statistics regarding how common they are projected to become in the future:
The original idea of driverless cars was introduced by General Motors in a 1939 exhibit and made a reality in 1958.
By now, most people have heard of Waymo, Google's launch into the self-driving car industry. Waymo vehicles have currently logged the most miles out of all the various autonomous vehicle models. However, Waymo began as a secret.
The project was started by Sebastian Thrun, who led his robotics team at Stanford University to win the DARPA Grand Challenge. Several years after beginning the project, Google revealed that its fleet of autonomous vehicles had driven over 300,000 miles. The vehicles have now logged more than 20 million miles on public roads.
While the technology spurring the growth of autonomous vehicles is still under development, here is what we know so far:
According to the Society of Automotive Engineers, there are six levels of driving automation that range from level 0 with no automation to level 5, a fully automated, driverless car. Here is more information about each level of automation:
Autonomous vehicles are typically equipped with many different sensors. Sensors monitor various data points and feed this information into the vehicle’s computer. There may be several sensors in the vehicle, including:
Autonomous vehicles use the sensors and other technologies to create a map of their surroundings. As they receive more information, they fill in more information on the map. They process the sensory input and plot a path based on it. The vehicles are also equipped with complex algorithms, predictive machine learning systems, and object recognition tools to help software follow traffic rules and avoid collisions.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has identified five major advantages of autonomous vehicles:
While these potential benefits are exciting, autonomous vehicles still face challenges that pose a threat to safety, such as:
Here are some additional facts about self-driving cars and safety, along with some autonomous driving accident statistics.
A research study published in late 2023 found that human rideshare drivers were more likely to be responsible for traffic crashes in San Francisco after reviewing data from 5.6 million miles of human rideshare drivers compared to 1 million miles of driverless rideshares. The researchers found that humans crashed more than double the rate of driverless vehicles. However, this technology is still being developed, so there may not be sufficient information to determine which set of drivers is really safer.
In 2018, a woman in Tempe, Arizona was behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber vehicle that hit and killed a pedestrian. She was charged with negligent homicide and was believed to have been distracted by her phone at the time of the incident. The accident led to Arizona temporarily suspending driverless operations in the state. Uber's self-driving cars were involved in 37 minor accidents before the pedestrian death.
A study published in Science Direct shows that out of the motor vehicle collisions studied, 64.2% of those involving autonomous vehicles were rear-end accidents, compared to 28.3% of accidents involving conventional vehicles.
The same Science Direct article revealed that 65.2% of accidents involving autonomous vehicles occurred when the vehicle proceeded straight when it should not have. Other common driving maneuvers involving autonomous vehicles and how often they contributed to accidents include:
The Science Direct article found the following driver errors in crashes involving autonomous vehicles:
To date, Tesla's Deaths Database suggests 35 people have died in accidents involving the vehicle's autopilot program.
Automakers reported nearly 400 crashes that involved vehicles with partially automated driver assistance systems over an 11-month period. This included 273 crashes involving Tesla vehicles.
If you were hurt by a driver who was disengaged and relying on autopilot or other autonomous tools that did not work properly, contact the Chicago personal injury team at Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard P.C. for a free, no-obligation consultation.
