Self-Driving cars are a new thing. Being able to sit back and relax, while your car drives itself around. Not stressing your nerves out while parallel parking, because your self-driving car’s got you! The question remains are self-driving cars safe It follows all the road safety rules for you while being a part of the routine traffic. Wait. Traffic. That’s the cake of the icing.
Due to their incapacity to understand human behavior, self-driving cars add to traffic congestion and maybe dangerous. According to recent research, these autonomous cars, which are frequently hailed as the future of transportation, have difficulty deciphering the nuanced social cues that influence human behavior when driving.
Choosing whether to yield or move forward in traffic is a crucial illustration of this problem since humans often make this choice quickly and intuitively. However, autonomous vehicles frequently fail to understand how people behave in traffic. The award-winning study by a group at the University of Copenhagen shows that as a result, their responses might cause traffic gridlock and irritate other road users.
Recent Implementation
After California recently approved self-driving taxis during low-traffic hours, there were, unfortunately, quite a few incidences recorded.
Unfortunately, San Francisco traffic has already been affected by the introduction of self-driving automobiles. According to NBC News, Google’s Waymo fleet of self-driving cars and Cruise taxis is already causing mayhem on Bay Area roadways. Over 90 instances involving autonomous cars on city roadways were recorded by the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Study
Choosing whether to yield or move forward in traffic is a crucial illustration of this problem since humans often make this choice quickly and intuitively. However, autonomous vehicles frequently fail to understand how people behave in traffic. This study plays a huge role in answering questions like “Are self-driving cars safe?”
The award-winning study by a group at the University of Copenhagen shows that as a result, their responses might cause traffic gridlock and irritate other road users.
“The ability to navigate in traffic is based on much more than traffic rules. Social interactions, including body language, play a major role when we signal each other in traffic. This is where the programming of self-driving cars still falls short,” says Professor Barry Brown, from Copenhagen’s Department of Computer Science, who has been studying the evolution of self-driving car behavior on the road for the past five years, in a university release. “That is why it is difficult for them to consistently understand when to stop and when someone is stopping for them, which can be both annoying and dangerous.”
In some areas of the United States, many businesses have started taxi services using self-driving cars, including Waymo and Cruise. In the United States and Canada, Tesla has made its Full Self-Driving (FSD) model available to almost 100,000 volunteer drivers. Despite these developments, Prof. Brown and his team point out that little is known about how these cars function on the road because it is a closely guarded trade secret. These little developments and setbacks make the general public question, are self driving cars safe.
Road Safety Concerns
In the UK, fully autonomous vehicles are currently illegal. The development and testing of some self-driving elements, such as a bus service in Scotland, are being done in more focused trials.
The UK Transport Secretary indicated that some types of cars, buses, and trucks with self- driving characteristics may potentially be running on highways in 2023 along with the announcement of a £100 million investment to accelerate the introduction of autonomous vehicles on the nation’s roads.
Nevertheless, security issues are the causes of this technology’s delayed uptake. According to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), automakers recorded over 400 accidents with automated cars in 2022. Six lives were lost as a result of these mishap.
