Autonomous technology could prevent half of all road deaths: report

Autonomous technology in all new vehicles could prevent up to half of Australia’s road deaths, a new report suggests.

The ‘Safety Benefits of Cooperative ITS and Automated Driving’ report, completed by the Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) and funded by Austroads, recently investigated the benefits of key Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) and automated driving applications.

According to the report there are huge savings in a number of key areas due to the safety of emerging C-ITS technology.

An estimate of the savings is directly linked to road trauma across Australia and New Zealand.

Almost 1300 people are killed and 35,500 hospitalised in Australia, whilst across the pond in New Zealand, 319 people were killed and 12,270 injured in 2015.

According to the report 35 to 50 per cent of these statistics could be prevented with future adoption of C-ITS technology.

Austroads chief executive Nick Koukoulas said the report drew on data to understand whether technologies such as forward collision warning, curve speed warning, intersection movement assist, right turn assist, lane keeping assist and autonomous emergency reduced road injuries and fatalities.

“Australia’s road transport agencies see connected and automated driving as a key component of achieving road safety trauma reductions,” Mr Koukoulas concluded.

Along with in-car autonomous driving technology and smart integrated infrastructure such as road signs and traffic signals, C-ITS applications were found to have the potential to significantly reduce road crashes and injury consequences. The technology uses wireless communications to alert drivers, intervene in dangerous situations, reduce traffic congestion and increase system efficiency.

MUARC senior research Fellow David Logan, a lead member of the study, noted significant benefits projected on the basis of the vehicle safety applications being introduced in all light passenger vehicles.

“The full adoption among the light passenger vehicle fleet of a selection of key automated driving and connected vehicle safety applications has the potential to prevent between 4100 and 6500 fatal and serious injury crashes in Australia and 310-485 fatal and serious injury crashes in New Zealand each year,” said Dr Logan.

As such, Koukoulas has called for continued trials of the systems.

“Given the potential significant road trauma benefits, this report underlines the need to continue to invest in supporting physical and digital infrastructure, policy and trials to further understand what our future needs will be,” Mr Koukoulas said.

This enthusiasm may be dampened by insurance companies who themselves are taking a closer look at the technology, with a lot of water to go under the bridge before we get to an optimal, safe, autonomous driving future.

At the upcoming 2nd International Driverless Vehicle Summit in Adelaide, speaker Kane Blackman from the Insurance Commission of Western Australia, will explore just what our hands-off future may mean when things hit the courts.

Personal injury insurance will need to adapt having implications for insurers, manufacturers, suppliers, motorists and policymakers.

“Driverless vehicle technologies promise fewer vehicle crashes and less insurance claims. This is an outcome we all look forward to,” Mr Blackman said.

“Currently human drivers cause most motor vehicle crashes, but when an automated vehicle – which makes decisions based on its programming, sensor feeds and inputs from the surrounding network – crashes, there might not be a driver at fault,” he said.

“Manufacturers and suppliers are legally obliged to provide products to consumers that are safe, free from defects and fit for purpose. There will be an expectation that automated vehicle manufacturers and suppliers accept liability should their products fail and cause injury.”

It will be this transition period where most debate will occur. As the technology ramps up and humans are slowly removed from the equation, older vehicles with lower levels of automation will be either naturally removed from the road or legislated against.

It will take some time to pull all of this together, along with a bunch of reluctant humans unwilling to give up driver control.

Dia Hussein, the chair of Swinburne’s Department of Civil and Construction Engineering, is one advocate for removing the human factor from our roads.

In a presentation to a seminar on the future of travel, Dr Dia said human error was to blame for up to 90 per cent of the 1.2 million deaths that occur each year from car accidents around the world.

“A large proportion (of car accidents) could be avoided by using self-driving vehicles and there is compelling logic in removing humans – the key source of the error – from the driving equation,” he said.

“Driven by artificial intelligence, these vehicles will not make errors of judgement the way a human driver does.

“They will not drink and drive. They will not fall asleep behind the wheel. They will not get distracted by playing Pokemon Go.  Under this scenario, insurers might move away from covering private consumers from risk tied to “human error” to covering manufacturers and mobility providers against technical failure,” he told the seminar.

Dr Dia explained that, largely, we have the hardware needed to detect and process the world around a vehicle as it travels down a suburban street, but that is not the current issue.

“Unlike the hardware, (the software) is not something that can be found off the shelf,” he told the seminar.

“(The software) is calibrated by showing an artificial neural network examples of hundreds of thousands or even millions of videos and images from real-life conditions so that it can recognise and respond to different situations.

“It is like holding a child’s hand when crossing the road and teaching them what to do through constant experiences and replication.”

He said the challenge for software companies was not in developing software that could detect objects, but in developing software that could have an understanding of objects.

“For example, if a human is driving down a suburban street and sees a soccer ball rolling out in front of the car, the driver would probably slow down since a child might be close behind,” he said.

“Even with advanced artificial intelligences, would a self-driving car know how to react?”