Driverless Cars To Save 300,000 Lives In 10 Years

A report predicting the consequences of increased use of driverless cars, claims that by 2050, automated vehicles could reduce road fatalities by 90%. McKinsey and Company, the U.S. based consultancy firm that released the report, claims that by removing human error and emotion from driving, road accidents will be drastically reduced. If correct, then not only would road injuries and deaths drop dramatically, but hundreds of billions of dollars will be saved each year.

Automated Vehicles (AVs) and Advanced Driver Assisted Systems (ADAS) are becoming an increasingly promising and interesting market. Significant research is being conducted to investigate how a society dominated by driverless vehicles could work. Researchers at Michigan University have even built an entire artificial town, ‘Mcity’, solely for the purpose of creating a safe environment to test AVs to their full potential. McKinsey and Company interviewed over thirty experts around the globe to try and predict the effects of the growing industry.

Their results show that if AVs and ADAS become mainstream, car crash fatalities would drop to such a degree that road deaths would fall from from 2nd to 9th place as a cause of accident-related death in the U.S. For every road death, there are eight times as many hospitalizations, which would also be vastly reduced. These accidents create a huge financial cost for the economy too. Road accidents cost the U.S. an estimated $212 billion in 2012. If the predictions of 90% fewer accidents are correct, this would equate to an annual saving of $190 billion.

Additionally, they predict that average road users will save 50 minutes every day. That adds up to a billion extra free-hours per day globally, which as they are keen to point out, is the same amount of time it took to built the Great Pyramid of Giza. If current trends are anything to go by, users are less likely to be building pyramids and more likely to be spending time using mobile data. This alone could generate an extra $5 billion per minute in digital revenue.

A study in July 2015 predicted that road deaths would not be the only factor to fall by 90%. Compared to current petrol cars, Berkeley Labs estimates that driverless taxis would reduce greenhouse emissions by 90% in 2030. Largely, this would be down to the ability to ‘right-size’; having far more control over the size of the vehicle sent for each job.

Despite their predicted positive implications for the economy, road safety, the environment and even parking space problems, AV producers such as Google and Apple still have an uphill battle ahead of them. Polls suggests that most users are still hostile to the idea of automated vehicles. McKinsey and Company admit that the industry and regulatory establishments face a “significant, strategic challenge” in the coming years.


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