Driverless cars are mostly safer than humans – but worse at turns

One of the largest accident studies yet suggests self-driving cars may be safer than human drivers in routine circumstances – but it also shows the technology struggles more than humans during low-light conditions and when performing turns.

The findings come at a time when autonomous vehicles are already driving in several US cities. The GM-owned company Cruise is trying to restartin March led California to suspend its operating permit. Meanwhile, Google spin-off Waymo has been gradually expanding robotaxi operations in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.

Next, they used a statistical matching method to find pairs of accidents that occurred under similar circumstances, with shared factors such as road conditions, weather, time of day and whether the incident took place at an intersection or on a straight road. They focused this matching analysis on 548 self-driving car crashes reported in California – excluding less automated vehicles that only have driver assistance systems.

One research roadblock is the “autonomous vehicle accident database is still small and limited”, says Abdel-Aty. He and Ding described the need for “enhanced autonomous vehicle accident reporting” – a major caveat echoed by independent experts.A robot named Musashi with a human-like "skeleton" and "musculature" can perform basic driving tasks – but this isn’t the safest approach to autonomous transportat George Mason University in Virginia.

Some crashes do not get reported to the police if they only involve minor fender benders, and so any comparisons of autonomous vehicle crashes versus human driver crashes need to account for that factor, saysof Google’s early tests of self-driving cars found just three out of 10 specific crashes made it into police reports.at Arizona State University. “Autonomous vehicles – particularly robotaxis – often operate in particular areas and environments, making it difficult to generalise findings.

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