Google announced last Friday that a prototype of its own self-driving car will hit the streets in its hometown of Mountain View, CA in a pilot test. Each car will be equipped with a human ready to take over the wheel, if needed, and the car speed will be capped at 25 mph.
Google also revealed its track record for autonomous vehicle safety with impressive results thus far. In the 1.7 million miles of the manual and autonomous driving Google has logged in the past six years, there have only been 11 minor accidents—all of which were caused by other drivers—and none resulting in injuries.
Google’s Chris Urmson, director of its driverless car program, said in a statement: “…not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.”
These early numbers are impressive, especially since these driverless cars have been on the road for 10,000 miles a week and in some crazy driving conditions.
About those accidents, Urmson noted: “Rear-end crashes are the most frequent accidents in America, and often there’s little the driver in front can do to avoid getting hit; we’ve been hit from behind seven times, mainly at traffic lights but also on the freeway. We’ve also been side-swiped a couple of times and hit by a car rolling through a stop sign.”
You can see a detailed report by Urmson in his article on Medium.
Though some continue to question the safety of testing driverless vehicles on public highways, and we have a ways to go before autonomous driving hits prime time… it’s also good to keep in perspective the impact of human error (the cause of 94% of accidents) and the risk of distracted drivers.
Lot’s of people aren’t paying attention on our roadways, which Google’s driverless cars have experienced.
People are eating, drinking, smoking, talking on cell phones, adjusting their entertainment consoles, navigating via digital maps, or you name it. On any given day, Distracted.gov estimates over 660,000 vehicles are being driven by someone using a hand-held cell phone… And it has been shown that a lot of our distraction has to do with drivers using smartphone technology while behind the wheel.
In fact, AT&T this week released an alarming new survey that shows that motorists have expanded their behind-the-wheel activities from just talking and texting to use of Facebook, Twitter, taking selfies and even videos.
Here are a few of AT&T’s salient numbers of smartphone activities undertaken while driving:
- 70% people engage in smartphone activities while driving
- 61% text
- Nearly 40% use social media
- About 30% surf the net and/or use Facebook
- 17% snap selfies
- 14% use Twitter, Integra
- Around 10%-plus use video chat and Snap Chat
AT&T revealed the research along with its launch of its expanded “It Can Wait” ad campaign, moving its focus from just texting while driving to include other smartphone driving distractions.
Other recent studies indicate that anything that takes your attention away from the road for just two seconds or longer can increase the risk of an accident from four to 24 times…Sending or reading a text takes your eyes off the road for 5 seconds, according to info collected by Distracted.gov. Imagine the seconds devoted to viewing real-time social media feeds, or framing a selfie?
People very well should be concerned about bumps in the road for fully autonomous cars, which are a lot more than smartphones on wheels. But the usage of smartphone technology inside our autos poses another and very real safety challenge and far bigger threat today that we need to be more focused on and deal with!
I applaud AT&Ts effort and those of others to educate the public on the problem of technology-induced distracted driving – although a lot more than education needs to be done.
And I also applaud Google’s goal to have smart self-driving cars in the future to at least share the burden of driving with humans. It may not solve all of our roadway safety problems in the future – but it sure may help!
In the meantime, it’s incumbent upon all of us in technology industry who are contributing to our increasingly connected mobile future, to be vigilant about all aspects of our products’ safety, security, and privacy.
Title image courtesy of Google.
