November 13, 2023
WE CAN'T GET RID OF DRIVERS FAST ENOUGH:
Car Crashes Are a Public Health Crisis, and Autonomous Vehicles May Be the Cure (Jordan McGillis, 11/09/23, Discourse)
And yet, another public health horror--one of much graver annual and cumulative impact--exists today in our collective blind spot. Since 2020, motor vehicle collisions have killed more than 120,000 people in the U.S. and sent an estimated 10 million more to emergency rooms. Mercifully, a solution of a profundity comparable to Salk's vaccine--autonomous vehicles--could significantly lower these terrible figures if strategically adopted.By taking humans out of the driver's seat, autonomous vehicles remove the proximate cause of the vast majority of crashes. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) "Critical Reasons for Crashes Investigated in the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey" released in 2015, in 94% of collisions the "immediate reason for the critical pre-crash event" was the vehicle's human driver. This finding corroborates a 1977 NHTSA-commissioned study, which found that human errors "were probably causes in about 90-93% of accidents" and "were possibly a cause in up to 97.9% of accidents."
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 13, 2023 12:00 AM
