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To Save the Most Lives, Deploy (Imperfect) Self-Driving Cars ASAP

Cars crash a lot: Nearly 37,500 Americans died on the roads last year. Autonomous cars would crash less (for one thing, they don’t drink or text or yell at their kids in the backseat). But that doesn’t mean drivers are ready to give over the wheel.

"There will be a horrific crash, not long after the vehicles are introduced, because automobiles crash a lot," says David Groves, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, a policy think-tank. "We are so numb and tolerant of the crashes that occur by the thousands all around us every year," he says. "But the first autonomous vehicle crash is going to be extremely novel." In other words: Expect a freak out.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But it’s meaningful, too. They conclude that tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved by self-driving cars, even if regulators allow less-than-perfect cars on the road. As Groves puts it, "Even though we can’t predict the future, we found it’s really hard to imagine a future where waiting for perfection doesn’t lead to really big opportunity costs in terms of fatalities."

Aarian Marshall

https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-rand-report/

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