I had a conversation with someone yesterday in which I asserted that a shift toward more autonomous vehicles will improve safety. He immediately objected and listed a bunch of computer related disasters.
What I don't think this person realized is that computers have steadily taken a bigger and bigger role in the transportation they use every day. The biggest automotive safety advance in years, electronic stability control (ESC), is a computerized system. The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), estimates that ESC reduces accidents by 35 percent. Every generation of commercial airliners includes more and more sophisticated avionics software. The airline industry is going through it safest period in years.
In contrast, the NHTSA reported 5,973,000 U.S. car accidents in 2006, which caused 42,642 deaths and 2,575,000 injuries. In addition, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death for every age from 2 through 34. I don't have any statistics available to prove it, but I'm confident the vast majority of these accidents share one primary cause -- human error.
Links: NHTSA 2006 Fact Sheet | NHTSA on ESC
1 comments:
I'm curious if these sort of systems can scale linearly, or if you are dealing with a whole new set of problems with cars that airlines don't encounter.
As an example, airplanes rarely have to encounter route changes as a result of seeing something fun on the side of the road. If car A decides to modify its route, how does that affect cars B and C?
I think its far from an insurmountable issue, but I would assume that its a pretty complex coupled Human-Vehicle system.
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