Will automated vehicles really be safer?

More than 40,000 Americans die each year in motor traffic fatalities. Worldwide, the number is more than 1 million. Manufacturers and regulators of autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs) are keenly aware that they will need to be noticeably safer than human drivers for robotaxis to gain widespread adoption.

Google’s Waymo recently reported having completed 1 million vehicle-miles of fully autonomous travel with “only two collisions” and “no reported injuries”.  Waypoint - The official Waymo blog: First Million Rider-Only Miles: How the Waymo Driver is Improving Road Safety.

It is too soon, based on one company operating in just a couple of cities (predominantly San Francisco and Phoenix) and in one country, to say with certainty that A-EVs are safer, but they might be. We will need more data.

Explore the evidence...

• Tesla’s auto-pilot A-EV is 8.9 times safer than the average human driver. If everyone drove a car with autopilot, we would save 900,000 lives globally every year. Watch RethinkX co-founder Tony Seba explain this in more detail in this video
• Autonomous vehicles will be safer than human drivers, leading to a decrease in road traffic accidents. In 2015, 1.25 million people died from road traffic accidents globally, according to the World Health Organization. Moreover, every year up to 50 million people suffer from non-fatal injuries, which impact quality of life and incur economic costs in the aftermath of a road traffic crash. Learn more about this phenomenon on p53 of our Rethinking Transport report.
• Our detailed analysis has shown that factors like safety and low cost of transport-as-a-service (TaaS) will mean that owners of vehicles, even A-EVs, will abandon their individually owned vehicles at a speed and scale that mainstream analysts have failed to predict. 
  • To learn more about how electric vehicle (EV) and A-EV adoption will unfold globally, read page p27-30 of our report Rethinking Transportation.
  • Read p15-19 of our report Rethinking Transportation to learn more about the economics of the A-EV and TaaS disruption.

• Read more about liability, injury and vehicle damage on p62 of our Rethinking Transportation report
• Read the Tesloop Case Study on p20-21 of our report Rethinking Transportation to learn about Tesloop, the California-based robotaxi company. As they state: "beyond the specific cost structure advantages, there is something more profound happening here. When you take away 99% of accident risk, it changes the scalability of TaaS."
• According to an NHTSA report, Tesla's crash rates decreased by 40% after it introduced its autopilot capability in 2015. (Hawkins, A. 2017. Tesla’s Crash Rate Dropped 40 Percent After Autopilot Was Installed, Feds Say. The Verge, January 19. Retrieved from here.)

Witness the transformation

 TaaS will ultimately disrupt the entire transportation industry, as it is cheaper and safer.

Choosing TaaS over independently owned vehicles will lead to a disruption in costs of up to 10 times. We know of no other market where a cost differential of 10 times has not led to a disruption.

Beyond the specific cost structure advantages, there is something more profound happening here. When you take away 99% of accident risk, it changes the scalability of TaaS. When you take away not just the maintenance cost, but unexpected downtime, it enables high availability. But most importantly, there is a paradigm shift happening where vehicles are becoming servers.