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In 2022, Cruise were the leader when it came to disengagement performance, with a score of nearly 96,000 miles per disengagement, nearly 50% as safe as humans. During its 863,000 miles of testing, safety drivers only needed to intervene with the system nine times. As part of IDTechEx’s research in “Autonomous Cars, Robotaxis & Sensors 2024-2044”, IDTechEx looks closely at the disengagements and collisions in which autonomous vehicles are involved. Doing so uncovers a surprising fact: four out of the nine disengagements were caused by the poor performance of other nearby drivers. If these are removed from the equation, then Cruise's miles per disengagement score shoots up to over 170,000, 85% of the way to the rate at which humans have collisions.
Miles per disengagement is only a proxy for autonomous vehicle safety, though. Since a safety driver has intervened, it is impossible to know whether the car would have collided or not. Instead, perhaps the number of collisions that autonomous vehicles are involved in should be considered.
Between January 2019 and May 2023, the autonomous vehicle companies testing across California submitted more than 450 collision reports. These reports cover a wide range of collision types, from collisions with other vehicles to hitting curbs and even the vehicles being attacked by pedestrians. As part of IDTechEx’s research, its analysts have read and analyzed each of these reports, finding that only 3.4% of collisions could be attributed to the poor performance of the autonomous system. Another way to look at it is that in 2022, the autonomous driver would cause collisions at a rate of 1 collision per 1.3 million miles, significantly better than human drivers. But this is with a human behind the wheel monitoring the system. What about when the system has no human safety net? How much do they collide then?
Since 2020, California has allowed driverless autonomous testing on its streets, and two companies have taken advantage of this. Waymo and Cruise. Between 2021 and 2022, Waymo has recorded just under 70,000 miles of driverless activity. On the other hand, Cruise only started recording driverless miles in 2022 but submitted a staggering 590,000 miles. During those miles, the vehicles were involved in 15 collisions, i.e., 1 collision every ~40,000 miles, or 5 times more often than their human counterparts.
One point of redemption is that these miles were exclusively accumulated in San Francisco, one of the toughest driving environments in the US for autonomous systems. But also tough for humans. With the slower speeds and increased pedestrian presence, IDTechEx estimates that the collision rate amongst human drivers increases from one per ~200,000 miles (the US average across all road types) to one in every 107,000 miles, only half as good, but still better than autonomous drivers.
There is one other statistic that should be considered when talking about the safety performance of autonomous vehicles. Of those 450+ collisions recorded by the companies testing autonomous cars, none involved a major injury or death. In the 4 years of testing, from 2019 to 2022, that is nearly 14 million miles without a serious injury or fatality. NHTSA say that with human drivers, a fatality happens roughly once per 75 million miles of human driving. So autonomous vehicles still have a way to go to catch up, but it is looking promising.
Whether you look at miles per disengagement, miles per collision, or miles per fatality, humans still have a better track record than autonomous vehicles. However, human safety has been fairly stagnant. The rate at which we crash is not changing that much, and further improvement is mostly coming from crash mitigation technology, such as automatic emergency braking systems and blind spot detection. One thing that can be said for autonomous vehicles is that their safety has been improving at somewhat of an exponential rate. Something that humans are very unlikely to mimic. IDTechEx does not believe that autonomous vehicles are as safe as humans yet, nor are they ready for widespread unsupervised deployment. The rate of improvement that autonomous technologies have shown demonstrates that there is the potential for them to far exceed human levels of safety in the future, leading us toward a world in which we stop questioning whether autonomous cars are ready and start questioning whether human drivers are safe enough.
To find out more about the IDTechEx report “Autonomous Cars, Robotaxis & Sensors 2024-2044”, including downloadable sample pages, please visit www.IDTechEx.com/autonomouscars.
About IDTechEx
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