False. Autonomous vehicles are already statistically safer than manually driven vehicles.

The safety gap will only increase over time, and eventually autonomous vehicles will be so much safer that societies will need to consider banning manual driving because of its unacceptable risks.

Explore the evidence...

• Autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs) are safer than human drivers, leading to a decrease in road traffic accidents. In 2015, 1.25 million people died from road traffic accidents globally, according to the World Health Organization. Moreover, every year up to 50 million people suffer from non-fatal injuries, which impact quality of life and incur economic costs in the aftermath of a road traffic crash. Learn more about this phenomenon on p53 of our Rethinking Transport report.

• If everyone drove a car with autopilot, we would save 900,000 lives globally every year. This is explained by RethinkX co-founder Tony Seba in our YouTube Series The Great Disruption.

• Tesla's auto-pilot A-EV is 8.9 times safer than the average human driver. Watch RethinkX co-founder Tony Seba describe this in more detail.
• Read more about liability, injury and vehicle damage on p62 of our Rethinking Transportation report.
• Read the Tesloop Case Study on p20-21 of our report Rethinking Transportation to learn about Tesloop, the California-based robotaxi company. As they state: "Beyond the specific cost structure advantages, there is something more profound happening here. When you take away 99% of accident risk, it changes the scalability of TaaS (Transport-as-a-Service)."
• According to an NHTSA report, Tesla's crash rates decreased by 40% after it introduced its autopilot capability in 2015. (Source - Hawkins, A. 2017. Tesla’s Crash Rate Dropped 40 Percent After Autopilot Was Installed, Feds Say. The Verge, January 19. Retrieved from here.)

Witness the transformation

The disruption of transportation will be led by A-EVs and TaaS.

When you take away 99% of accident risk, it changes the scalability of Transport-as-a-Service (TaaS). When you take away not just the maintenance cost, but unexpected downtime, it enables high availability. But most importantly, there is a paradigm shift happening where vehicles are becoming servers.

Published on: 12/07/23