Autonomous vehicles, bet on the end of accidents
Portugal
For some years now, autonomous vehicles have been circulating along the roads and, despite their curiosity, they are no longer "new."
More than the absence of driver these vehicles promise a revolution with regard to road safety and reduction of road deaths. Current driver assistance technologies and, in the future, the autonomous vehicle, contribute to this goal and a number of industry players have already made clear commitments. Volvo, for example, has set itself the goal of reducing the number of fatalities to zero in its vehicles by 2020, and Google estimates that it is possible to halve road deaths thanks to autonomous vehicles.
"In a more or less distant future, we can certainly speak of 'zero loss', but before we achieve this, autonomous vehicles will have to coexist with human driving. There will be a transition phase that will not be without risks, since the fully autonomous vehicle will have difficulties in predicting sometimes random and often potentially dangerous behaviors of motorists, "says Diogo Lopes Pereira, Cetelem's marketing director.
This observer recently launched a study where he analyzed the autonomous vehicles as a solution to fight road mortality. But even after the start of commercialization, there is still a period of coexistence with human drivers. The eCall, a geolocated emergency system designed to launch an alert for a crash center in the event of an accident. According to the available data, Man is responsible for 90% of accidents. In a world of fully autonomous vehicles, there will no longer be any drivers with risk behaviors: drunk drivers, sleepy or distracted drivers.
There will also be a risk associated with autonomous driving, but much more controlled than human errors. It should be remembered that last February, Google Car was responsible for a road accident for the first time precisely because it failed to anticipate the unpredictable behavior of a bus driver. Still, this was the first, and so far the only time, that Google's stand-alone car failed at two million miles more.
