According to a recent study, the autonomous vehicle is significantly safer towards other road users than human drivers are. Which is reassuring, but this came after years of testing. If de-regulation hits the US, we could lose valuable testing time and be rushing self-driving cars onto roads too quickly. — Filepic/AFP
Recently, a passenger in a Waymo-operated self-driving vehicle recorded himself circling endlessly in an airport parking lot in the United States. In the video, he’s on with tech support who seems quite powerless to stop the vehicle, though they say they are trying to pull the car over.
The user says he’s getting dizzy and is worried about missing his flight but seems only mildly upset in the video – then again, in a self-driving car gone rogue scenario, circling a parking lot seems like a pretty benign case. The nightmare scenario is the autonomous car using its agency to drive off a cliff or into oncoming traffic.
What is the future with fully self-driving cars?
With Donald Trump headed for the US presidency on Jan 20 and taking best friend Elon Musk along for the ride, many are expecting regulations to be dropped around Musk’s signature company Tesla, which makes fully self-driving vehicles among other products.
What would this mean? People are surmising that it could mean a fast adoption of driverless vehicles on the roads in the United States. Which ... sure, could be great. But regulations exist for a purpose – I know Trump and Musk would likely disagree with me on this – and that purpose is usually to keep people safe, in which case the driverless vehicle regulations are doing exactly what they are designed to do and shouldn’t really be dropped.
Dropping regulations would mean more self-driving vehicles on the road quicker, and while I do think this is likely in the future, is this something we want to rush?
According to data extracted from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in the United States in 2022 there were 1,450 self-driving car accidents. The trend is that 10% of autonomous vehicle accidents have resulted in injury, and 2% have resulted in a fatality.
Comparing that with normal driving stats is difficult. In the United States, fatality rates in car accidents are about 1.3 to 1.4 per million miles travelled. Current information suggests that autonomous vehicles would be competitive with those numbers or even lower.
This is all difficult to compare because many fully self-driving and autonomous vehicles are used in controlled settings. We cannot really extrapolate that out to the normal world where kids jump off the sidewalk and onto the street and rain can bucket down obscuring all visibility.
As I mentioned earlier, I do think eventually our roads will mostly have fully self-driving vehicles, but it might be a long journey to get there.
The main issue is that cars are dangerous. According to the World Health Organisation’s 2023 global status report on road safety, annual road traffic deaths was 1.19 million. We accept that because many of those crashes are – usually – driver error. People fall asleep, people don’t pay attention, but we put that on the driver. Are we willing to accept 1.19 million deaths at the will of a computer?
You could argue that accidents are inevitable and that fully self-driving cars will eventually become much, much safer than human-driven ones. Fully self-driving cars will never get tired. Or check messages while driving (or maybe they will but I assume fully self-driving cars can multitask better than humans). But before we get to this point there will be many mistakes and a lot of costly errors. Getting stuck driving in a circle around a parking lot is pretty minor when you think of what could happen. Like a fully self-driving vehicle running over a child, or a fully self-driving car crashing headlong into a family, killing them all. Obviously, these are things that the public is likely much less willing to forgive than driving in circles.
And that is because in these scenarios the victims are bystanders. Walking around, minding their own business when a fully self-driving car shows up and nails them. If you’re in a vehicle in a crash, you made your choice, there is some appreciation that you understand the risks. But if your fully self-driving car barrels into somebody, that choice was taken from them.
This is all to say, deregulation could happen under Trump. And that might mean the use of fully self-driving cars moves ahead quicker than previously anticipated. But I still believe there will be all these major stumbling blocks before the public fully accepts having tonnes of metal on wheels, controlled entirely by a computer, cruising around the same spaces their kids could accidentally run into.
And ironically, removing regulations could lead to one of these moments and set back the acceptance of fully self-driving vehicles more than if the regulations were kept in place. I do not know the outcome exactly, but I do know that things rarely work out the way everyone thinks they will.
One thing to take solace in, while fully self-driving cars are highly probable in the future, if a lot of the testing happens in the United States, hopefully by the time they make it to Malaysia, they’ve been perfected and all Malaysians have to do is sit back and enjoy.
Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at lifestyle@thestar.com.my and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
