I have some bad news: it is almost certain that you are a driver worse than you think you are.
Humans drive distracted. They conduct Drowssy. They drive angry. And, everyone’s sausage, they conduct with disabilities much more than they should. Just when we are shooting in all cylinders, our brains adapted to the stone age are often not rival for the speed and complexity of high speed driving. There are up to 2.5 seconds, what we perceive and how fast we can react in a vehicle travel to 60 mph, that a car will travel the equivalent of two lengths of the basketball court before its driver can hit the brake.
The result of this very human fallibility is blood in the streets. Almost 1.2 million people who are blocked worldwide every year, enough to fill nine jumbo airplanes every day. Here in the United States, the government estimates that there were 39,345 deaths for traffic in 2024, which adds to the hemta of people from a bus that perished every 12 hours.
The good news is that drivers are much, much better that enter online, and have everything that human drivers do not need to sleep. They don’t get angry. They do not get drunk. And their brains can handle high -speed decision making with ease.
The average American adult will pass around three years Or his life leading. If the robots could take the wheel, well, think of all Netflix programs that we could transmit instead.
But the true benefit of an autonomous revolution will be saved in lives. And the new data of the Waymo Autonomous Vehicle Company suggest that these savings could be very large.
In a study reviewed by pairs, it will be published in the magazine. Traffic injury preventionWaymo analyzed the security yield of its autonomous vehicles during 56.7 million miles driven in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, all With A human security driver present to take the wheel in an emergency. Then they compared that data with the safety of human driving in the same number of miles driven in the same road child.
The results of the study, almost certainly that the greatest and most complete research on the safety of autonomous cars so far released, are surprising.
A master class in driving security
Compared to human drivers, Waymo autonomous cars had:
- 81 percent less airbag display accidents
- 85 percent less accidents with serious or worse injuries
- 96 percent less accident accidents at intersections (mainly because Waymo detects red lights faster than humans)
- 92 percent less accidents that involve injuries to pedestrians.
If the typical cars fleet driven by humans would have covered those same 56.7 million miles, the Waymo Researchers project that would have resulted in an estimated 181 additional injuries, 78 additional air stock market accidents and 11 more Serius.
But the numbers really become striking when this data extends in the 3.3 billion miles of humans driven by humans in the United States in a typical year. The setback calculations of the environments suggest that if the same reduction of 85 percent seizes in serious shocks true heroes for the fatalities, a great if, to be clear, since the study had too Fowal events to measure approximately. That is five times the number of Americans who died in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Do not get in the way of progress
Of course, there are many warnings for the Waymo study and equally more obstacles before we could something like what is described above.
In part, because serious injury accidents are (fortunately) very rare, even 56.7 million miles are not long enough for researchers to be sure that such accidents would occur significantly with robots pilots. Waymo cars were also being conducted largely in warm and sunny places, which the company operated in geofented areas. It is much less sure how they could do it, let’s say, the Nevadas de Boston streets in the winter.
This is also a study managed by the company, although it has leg pairs reviewed by external experts. And if we decided to participate in AI drivers, produce enough autonomous vehicles to start replacing cars and trucks driven by humans would be a huge task, to say the least.
Even so, the data looks so good, and the number of deaths on our roads is so high that it would say that slowing the autonomous vehicles is actually costing lives. And there is a risk that is precisely what will happen.
Too much of the public focuses on unusual and atypical events with autonomous cars, while the butcher shop that occurs thanks to human drivers in a daily basic is simply treated as background noise. (That is an example of two common psychological biases: availability bias, which makes us judge the risk for atypical events that jump easily, and the negligence of the base rate, where we ignore that the underlying is the free of events. Coverage and consumption, and it is one of the reasons why I started good news.
The result is that public opinion has become against autonomous cars in recent years, to the point that vandals have attacked autonomous vehicles on the street. And, of course, since almost 5 million Americans earn a living through driving, any large -scale movement towards autonomous vehicles a significant economic interruption.
But still, 34,000 lives saved in an annual basic representation of the representatives tremendous progress. Maybe, after about 100 years of trying, it is time to give something more at the wheel.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News Bulletin. Register here!
