Millions of people a year die from traffic accidents worldwide. City leaders all over the globe are working to take action and improve road safety by pummeling millions of dollars into safety measures and infrastructure. However, some innovators have begun to address one of the key factors in most traffic accidents: human error.
The exploration and invention of driverless cars has been a topic of interest in many years with Tesla aiming to be the first company to successfully introduce self-driving cars. Test runs of these vehicles from several different companies has been occurring as early as 2014 with increased attention on their potential to reduce collisions.
However, some people have voiced doubts about the capabilities of these self-driving vehicles. Namely, the driverless cars cannot correct the mistakes of other road users such as pedestrians, cyclists and motorists and further, human error is not the only cause of traffic accidents.
The first driverless car was actually prototyped in the 1980’s at Carnegie Mellon University and interest in this field has only increased since. In recent years, testing on roads in Australia, the US and Europe has also been legalised.
Driverless technologies are designed to reduce error by replacing human perception and judgement with sensors and computer systems. Typically, these cars are equipped with radar, GPS, cameras, and artificial intelligence.
Environmental factors play a significant role as well. Street design, signs and signals, traffic conditions, and weather conditions all influence how motorists act on the road. Therefore, it is difficult to completely eliminate mistakes and almost impossible to completely eradicate accidents no matter how advanced this technology becomes. That being said, it does still hold tremendous potential at reducing the road toll! Only time will tell what impact these vehicles will have on our roads.