Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars
  3. News

Self-driving cars could save 20,000 American lives a year

By
Goo

Detailed extensively in a study published by the Eno Center for Transportation recently, a significant transition to the self-driving automobile within the United States could end up saving thousands of lives per year, reduce the total number of car crashes by 75 percent and save hundreds of billions in accident related costs. Of course, this would require an extremely high adoption rate of 90 percent within the United States. That’s approximately 115 million automated vehicles operating on the road. 

Specifically, the nonprofit estimates that the number of lives saved per year by eliminating the majority of fatal crashes in the U.S. would be around 21,700. It would also reduce the total accident number from 5.5 million per year down to 1.28 million, much of which would be attributed to the remaining non-automated vehicles on the road. Regarding financial savings, the group estimates a savings of $960 per year for each automated vehicle on the road as well as $3,100 in comprehensive costs per car.

Google Self-driving car

Also interesting to consider, mass adoption could lead to a 60 percent reduction in freeway congestion and a 25 percent reduction in fuel costs. This would be particularly advantageous for people that live in extremely congested cities like Los Angeles. Due to the probable low rate of accidents with a majority of automated vehicles on the road, the group estimates that the average lifespan of a vehicle would be around 15 years. The study also contains estimates based on a 10 percent and 50 percent adoption rate of self-driving vehicles, a more probable scenario over the next decade.

Recommended Videos

Of course, there are many barriers to even reach a ten percent adoption rate of automated vehicles within the United States. The most prohibitive barrier to entry is cost with price estimates currently hovering around $100,000. It’s unlikely that the cost of the highly technical systems used by automated vehicles will drop under $10,000 within the next ten years. Other issues pointed out within the study include licensing issues, potential litigation costs, the security of the software running the automated systems and the privacy of the data stored by the automated vehicle. 

Editors’ Recommendations

Mike Flacy
Mike Flacy
Contributing Editor
By day, I'm the content and social media manager for High-Def Digest, Steve's Digicams and The CheckOut on Ben's Bargains…
A weird thing just happened with a fleet of autonomous cars
A passenger getting into a Cruise robotaxi.

In what must be one of the weirder stories linked to the development of autonomous vehicles, a fleet of Cruise self-driving cars gathered together at an intersection in San Francisco earlier this week, parked up, and blocked traffic for several hours. And to be clear: No, they weren't supposed to do that.

Some observers may have thought they were witnessing the start of the robot uprising, but the real reason for the mishap was more prosaic: An issue with the platform's software.

Read more
Officers confused as they pull over an empty self-driving car
Cruise

In what appears to be the first incident of its kind, police officers recently pulled over a self-driving car with no one inside it.

The incident, which took place on a street in San Francisco earlier this month, was caught on video by a passing pedestrian. It shows several traffic cops pondering about how to handle the incident after stopping the vehicle for failing to have its front lights on while driving at night.

Read more
How a big blue van from 1986 paved the way for self-driving cars
Lineup of all 5 Navlab autonomous vehicles.

In 1986, a blue Chevy van often cruised around the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania near Carnegie Mellon University. To the casual observer, nothing about it appeared out of the ordinary. Most people would pass by it without noticing the camcorder peeking out from its roof, or the fact that there were no hands on the steering wheel.

But if any passerby had stopped to inspect the van and peer into its interior, they would have realized it was no ordinary car. This was the world's first self-driving automobile: A pioneering work of computer science and engineering somehow built in a world where fax machines were still the predominant way to send documents, and most phones still had cords. But despite being stuck in an era where technology hadn't caught up to humanity's imagination quite yet, the van -- and the researchers crammed into it -- helped to lay the groundwork for all the Teslas, Waymos, and self-driving Uber prototypes cruising around our streets in 2022.

Read more