Is The Time For Self-Driving Cars Now?

Tesla Autopilot often comes under heavy criticism every time there is a road traffic accident involving one of their cars. It often leads to criticism of the option to have your car self-driving. It should be noted that Tesla emphasises that while using the Autopilot mode the driver should be alert and awake and the function is merely to help the driver for a long journey on motorways for example.

Tesladeaths.com, a record of all accidents involving a Tesla car, whether the driver was at fault records that worldwide 110 deaths have occurred in accidents where a Tesla car has been involved since April 2013. Most of these accidents have occurred in the USA (which is to be expected due to the popularity of the company there and size in population).

The AutoPilot feature was not released until October 2015 meaning that 14 of said deaths occurred before the introduction of this feature. Within the remaining 96 deaths, only seven of the accidents have been reported as involving the self-driving feature with only five having confirmation of the feature playing a part in the accidents.

That five accidents in over four years which have had fatal results. When you compare these numbers with the numbers of road traffic accidents that result in loss of life the numbers are significantly lower. According to Gov.uk, the place to find government services and statistics in 2018 there were a reported 1,770 road deaths and in the US the numbers are even higher with the U.S. Department of Transportation reporting 36,560 motor vehicle deaths recorded in 2018.

It's easy to deduce from this that the problem itself doesn't lie wholly with Tesla or even other 'self-driving' car brands (although no deaths have occurred due to the AutoPilot function in any other brand). Although these cars are still growing in popularity all across the world time will tell if systems like this will be the new way of driving. It is easy to write off the concept of self-driving cars completely but when you look at the numbers of the human error via computer error it's not difficult to see the discrepancies.

The technology used in these cars is new and may still need some fine-tuning, but we have had human-piloted cars since the turn of the 20th century and the numbers of accidents are still very high. The chance of fully autonomous cars may be upon us soon and that isn't necessarily going to be a bad thing.