Judging from headlines, one might think dealer lots are brimming with cars that allow drivers to clock out while radar, cameras and other sensors do the navigating.
Though the U.S. market is inching toward that reality, consumers can’t buy a fully self-driving car and likely won’t be able to for many years.
The idea is tantalizing, not only for the convenience factor but also because it dangles the potential of a crash-free future. While that vision may one day come to fruition, it is far too early to retire the Institute’s crash-test dummies. There will be many crashes on the road to Vision Zero.
In the near term, the best way to reduce the risk is to renew focus on tried-and-true countermeasures, such as increasing safety belt use and reducing alcohol-impaired driving, and to continue pushing automakers to improve the crashworthiness of vehicles while refining driver assistance systems to address more kinds of crashes.
“The rhetoric has jumped ahead of the technology in many cases,” says Adrian Lund, IIHS president. “What many people think of as a self-driving car doesn’t exist yet. I can’t hop in my car, enter a destination and have it take me from point A to point B.
“What I can do is activate adaptive cruise control to maintain a safe following distance and speed, use lane-keeping assist to center my car and blind-spot assist to monitor adjacent travel lanes. These technologies improve my daily commute and add a layer of safety, but I am still the driver. I can’t fall asleep at the wheel.”
A rising crash death toll is adding to the urgency to automate driving. U.S. traffic deaths jumped an estimated 10 percent to 17,775 during the first half of 2016 compared with the year-ago period, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said in October. NHTSA aims to eliminate motor vehicle crash fatalities by 2046 and is looking to automated driving technology as one way to help meet that goal.
The potential benefits are immense: Thousands of lives could be saved by preventing crashes caused by driver-related factors. Preventing alcohol-impaired driving, for example, would have saved nearly 7,000 lives in 2014 if all drivers had a blood alcohol concentration below 0.08 percent. Preventing run-off-road crashes would have saved more than 7,500 lives in 2014, while eliminating red-light running crashes would have spared more than 700 lives.
The actual effect on the overall problem of crash deaths and injuries will depend on a number of factors, such as the degree to which automation reduces crashes, when and where automation can be used, and the number of miles driven autonomously.
Read more of the original article at IIHS.org.
