Video: Are Self-Driving Cars Really Safer?
Toyota's automated driving test vehicle enters a highway on-ramp in Tokyo, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2015. Koji Sasahara/AP
Research shows that automated vehicles might not be accident free.
It's no secret that automobiles can be deadly: In 2014 alone, 33,000 people died in road accidents in the United States.
With these grim statistics, it's no surprise one of the biggest selling points of a driverless car is the dramatic reduction in car accidents. But self-driving cars' big promise might not deliver. After testing these automated cars on a million miles of public roads, researchers found that accidents did still occur.
The research, from the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, found that self-driving models from Google, Audi and Delphi actually have a higher accident rate than their human-driven counterparts.
However, the accidents that did occur in these driverless tests were minor scrapes and were never the fault of the self-driving car. Instead, human-driven cars caused these accidents. Also important: all of this testing occurred under optimal conditions. More research is needed to see how self-driving cars fare in rain, sleet and snow.
To learn more, check out the video below from CNET:
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