Many see autonomous cars as the ultimate in road safety. Some commentators even go as far as postulating that non-autonomous driving would be banned as unsafe. This pictures a utopia of zero crashes, the cost to personal freedom seen as irrelevant. This is a dystopian view, where humans can not be trusted and for their own good must be relieved of all responsibility. There is every reason to use technology to make driving safer for everyone, but this approach seeks to limit personal freedom on a scale that would concern many people
Implicit in this view are two presumptions, namely that:
only autonomous systems can reduce accidents
autonomous cars would be intrinsically safe
The argument for improved safety (by fully autonomous cars) rests on the fact that human error is a factor in over 90% of collisions, 94% in the UK. Eliminate the human, so the argument goes, and you will eliminate most accidents.
The accident rate in the UK currently runs at just over 1700 deaths per year. Post war, the peak figure was in 1966, at nearly 8000. In the last 10 years, road deaths have halved. There is a broadly similar pattern in the USA, where over 54,000 deaths were recorded in 1969, dropping to 32,675 in 2014. The declining number of younger drivers has been established as a partial explanation for this drop in Sweden and the USA (ROSPA).
The following chart shows deaths per billion vehicle km in 2013 (data from WHO, 2015) for a number of the more populous countries where the data is available. Sweden has the lowest figures in the world, closely followed by the UK, both countries having around 3.5 deaths per billion km. The USA has twice as many deaths as the UK, but is nevertheless broadly similar to a number of other European countries as well as Japan. The figure for South Korea is not plotted, but stands at 20.
Fatalities per Billion Km
The reliability of the numbers for vehicle km may be open to question since it can only really be based on estimates, but the figures for deaths per 100,000 vehicles or per 100,000 of population are available for many more countries and may be more robust.
Annual Fatalities per 100,000 Population
For the death rate per year, per 100,000 of population, the comparison is roughly the same for the countries shown in the chart above, with the obvious exception of the USA ; at 10.6 this is 3.7 times the Sweden & UK figures (2.8 & 2.9).
Argentina, Chile, and Mexico all stand at around 12-13; Russia, China and India have around 16-18 deaths per 100,000 of population. Many countries have significantly worse records.
It's a similar picture if we look at fatalities per year per 100,000 vehicles.
Whereas most developed countries have fatality rates of 3 to 12 per 100,000 vehicles, the figures for China and India are 105 and 130 respectively, but countries in Africa have rates (apparently) anywhere from 500 to 9000+ fatalities per 100,000 vehicles.
Annual Fatalities per 100,000 Vehicles
It seems reasonable to assume that the high mortality rates in the less developed countries are largely a reflection of their level of development. It is less obvious why in western Europe there should be such large differences, but there are probably some structural reasons, for example, the proportion of distance travelled on motorways, but other factors will include the proportion of people who wear a seatbelt, and the prevalence of offences such as drunk driving and speeding, and the rigour with which these laws are enforced. The reason for the high figures in Belgium has been put down to the nature of the road network and the commuting patterns. The level of road deaths by country in Europe is shown here .
Even though the rates may differ markedly between counties in Europe, the overall trend is the same, a progressive decrease. In the EU, road deaths have dropped from 54,900 in 2001 to 25,700 in 2014.
The figures for the UK and Sweden clearly show what is achievable in a modern, developed country, but the UK figures bear closer examination to get an idea of what might be possible.
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