Car makers can’t “drive their way to safety” with self-driving cars

(credit: Ford)

The push for self-driving cars—at least here in the US—is happening mostly in the name of increasing road safety. More than 33,000 people die on US roads each year, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says its data shows that "in an estimated 94 percent of crashes, the critical cause is a human factor."

Advanced driver-assistance systems (think Tesla's autopilot or the semiautonomous mode on Audi's A4) are already a boon to drivers, reducing fatigue and keeping an ever-vigilant watch out for hazards, but the RAND Corporation has just published a study that suggests we may never be able to prove the safety of a self-driving car.

"Under even aggressive testing assumptions," the authors write, "existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles—an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use. These results demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability."

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