Q&A: Will self-driving cars reduce traffic injuries? Researchers examine promising data (Tech Xplore)
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Driverless vehicles haven't yet taken to Canadian roads, but they've already rolled out in some other countries. Proponents say the technology will mean fewer accidents, while others have raised concerns about safety, liability and public acceptance, among other issues.
A new study by researchers at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the University of Toronto provides data on the potential of automated vehicles to improve road safety in various adoption scenarios. The work, published in JAMA Surgery, was led by Armaan Malhotra, a U of T neurosurgery resident, and Avery Nathens, a chief of surgery at Sunnybrook and a professor of surgery in U of T's Temerty Faculty of Medicine.
Malhotra recently spoke with writer Erin Howe about the study findings.
What prompted you to look at this question around fully automated vehicles?
One of the most common things Professor Nathens, a trauma surgeon and the senior author on this paper, and I see frequently in our work is motor-vehicle collision-related injuries. This can include severe traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injuries, spine fractures, and chest and abdominal injuries. Often, they're life threatening or severely life-altering, and many of them are preventable.
Motor vehicle collisions frequently involve human error. In high-velocity collisions on highways, there's frequently intoxication. One thing people who champion fully automated vehicles talk about is that in a perfect world, self-driving vehicles could eliminate some of these problems. Theoretically, if the safeguards are good and the adoption is high enough, some say that autonomous vehicles are one of the largest possible interventions to reduce mortality and morbidity from traffic injuries. Before we began this project, there hadn't been much study into this issue through a health care lens.
Tell me about your findings.
To build our models, we used publicly available U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data from 2009 to 2023. It captured how many injuries there were each year, the number of miles traveled by vehicles and other metrics.
We also used public data from automated vehicle ride-sharing company Waymo that shows an 80% relative reduction in injuries when they compare fully automated vehicles to human drivers. We tested a more conservative 50% injury reduction in our modeling.
