Driverless Cars Will Result in Fatalities Before Wider Adoption, Expert Says

Due to recent incidents of traffic accidents and deaths caused by driverless cars, some of which were due to rushed developments and companies taking shortcuts, the public’s trust in self-driving vehicles has fallen. Based on the opinion of one expert, however, this trust is only going to erode even more since fatalities should apparently be expected before driverless cars are widely adopted.

The expert, in question, is Mark Rosekind. He is a former administrator at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and worked under the Obama administration. Speaking to the BBC, Rosekind noted how the rise of the driverless car industry will inevitably come with casualties. This is a simple fact that frankly resembles the rise of the conventional automobile industry.

“Unfortunately, there will be crashes. People are going to get hurt and there will be some lives lost,” Rosekind said. “All of that I think is going to be, I hope, focused on the service of trying to save lives.”

It has been largely accepted by the technology community and auto industry that self-driving cars are substantially safer on the roads than human drivers. Not prone to the same human errors that are caused by emotional instability, machines are more apt to follow traffic rules and allow for a smoother flow of traffic.

More to the point, thousands of people die every single day due to traffic accidents with human beings behind the wheel. Driverless vehicles could help reduce that number significantly.

As Futurism notes, it’s also unreasonable to expect that the development of self-driving cars will go smoothly or that there wouldn’t be any incidents that could lead to harm or fatalities. Progress has historically come at a price and in many of those cases, the costs were lives.

This isn’t to say that companies shouldn’t take steps to make sure that accidents will be reduced as much as possible or that they shouldn’t be held accountable for deaths or injuries.