Car Crash Challenges

We postponed dealing with the challenge of human driven vehicles crashing into the Autonomous Vehicles. There are of course many other collision perils: animals, debris, pedestrians, and,of course, many forms of weather.

So far we have focused on efficiency as a driver for our innovations, but Motor Vehicle crashes are also an important driver for improving our transportation system.

The Table below shows cumulative deaths from two different sources: US Motor Vehicle Deaths and US War Deaths. The dashed lines are projections at the last slope in the data, to illustrate the effects of Autonomous Vehicles. So far there have been no deaths from Autonomous Vehicles in the US.

• Motor vehicles killed 32,719 people in 2013.
• Motor Vehicles have killed 2.7 times as many Americans as all the Wars.

The Civil War was by far the deadliest war with 625,000 dead, yet, despite all the car safety improvements, more people have died due to motor vehicle crashes in the 17 years between 1997 and 2013, the most recent data.

(http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx accessed 11/13/15)

(http://www.militaryfactory.com/american_war_deaths.asp accessed 11/11/13, sic)

There are many causes for these crashes, but almost all of them are due to human issues: Alcohol-impaired crashes resulted in 10,076 of those deaths. (http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html accessed 11/13/15) 

We must do something about this slaughter.

In 2010 there were:

• 13.6 million motor vehicle crashes
• damaging 23.9 million vehicles
• injuring 3.9 million people.

The Economic Cost of those crashes was $242 billion.

Losses include: Property Damage, Medical & Emergency Services, Productivity, Workplace, Congestion & Travel Delay, Insurance Administration, Legal And Court Costs.

That’s $784 per person, and 1.6% of the real Gross Domestic Product for 2010.

(http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812013.pdf accessed 11/14/15)

Even these costs pale in comparison with the $594 billion Lost Quality of Life Costs.

A 2015 report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Authority, of data collected in 2005-2007 concluded that Drivers are the Critical Reason for 94% of crashes, with Vehicles, Environment, and Unknown each contributing only 2%.

(http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pubs/812115.pdf accessed 11/14/15)

Critical Reason for Crash	Number of Crashes
Drivers	2,046,000
Vehicles	44,000
Environment	52,000
Unknown	47,000

Autonomous Vehicles could eliminate all the crashes if we could just keep human driven vehicles and other hazards away from them.  In the next post you’ll see how enclosing roadways can accomplish all those things, plus more. We'll come back to the economics later.