Could Driverless Cars Increase Personal Injury Accidents? 

by Stephanie Caudle, contributing writer

Over the last several months, self driving cars have continued to be featured in breaking news headlines thanks in part to a recent Uber self driving car accident in Tempe, Arizona.  As an immediate response to the car accident the team at Uber agreed to suspend their new autonomous vehicle program until a full investigation of the car accident was completed. In a startling turn of events it was determined that the accident had very little to do with the autonomous car but instead was caused by a vehicle that was driven by a human who was making a left turn that failed to yield to the incoming Uber vehicle. 

While this particular personal injury accident was proven to not be caused by the driverless vehicle here are a plethora of things that personal injury lawyers and the general public should be made aware of as it relates to driverless cars: 

Driverless Car Safety is Expensive

According to an Associate Professor at the Department of Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Melbourne, driverless car safety is not as easy as many people may think. Because of this one of the biggest obstacles manufactures of driverless cars has to face is the inability to create safe driverless cars at a price that is affordable to their target audience. According to reports, the popular Google driverless car needs almost $200,000 in equipment in order to be able to drive it. This is because the car needs a Velodyne 64-beam laser in order to create a 3D map that is essential for the car to be able to drive by itself.

Driverless Car’s Don’t Protect Drivers From Human Error

Driverless car manufacturers have always dreamed of creating the perfect driverless car; however, the perfect car still does not exist. Because modern day technology is still relatively expensive it has become extremely hard for manufacturers to create a car that protects driverless cars from human errors. As humans we often have a decision to make when it comes to avoiding car accidents for example if a young child were to run out in front of your car as a human you can make a decision to hit another car or run into a ditch versus hitting the child. Unfortunately, an autonomous car doesn’t make those decisions which has led to an increase opposition of this autonomous car being manufactured nationwide.

Increase in Bumper to Bumper Traffic

If you are one of millions of people who seem to believe that access to driverless cars will make your traffic nightmares a memory of the past, think again. In fact, according to many highway safety officials, driverless cars actually have the ability to make congestion much worst. Practice simulations have proven that unless all cars are driverless, driverless cars will actually create even more congestion and traffic jams and unfortunately with more congestion also comes an increased number of car accidents. As time progresses however, it is believed that consumers will eventually begin to see less congestion and more of an improved commute.