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Self-Driving Cars Bring Huge Potential for Increasing Safety in Traffic
There are around 800 million cars in the world nowadays, and in the US, for instance, 87% of
working people commute by car (Thrun 99). About 42000 people die in the nearly 6 million
yearly traffic accidents in our country alone (Thrun 99). Despite current concerns about the
safety of autonomous vehicles, this technology brings about huge opportunities for improving
traffic safety, which could happen along rules that are collective debated and adopted by
society.
The potential of autonomous cars to improve traffic safety is owed to a number of
factors such as vehicle-vehicle communication, exchange of information with the cloud,
communication of the vehicle with the street infrastructure (Holstein et al. 1,3). These can
presumably enable instantaneous software upgrades or updates with regard to changing road
traffic conditions (in a given geographical area) available for all vehicles or all nearby
vehicles. Vehicle to vehicle communication can theoretically lead to collective (and hence,
smarter) decisions taken by cars during a critical road traffic situation that might prove life-
saving.
Also, because these vehicles integrate a multitude of sensors, like radars or LIDARS
(laser radars), GPS modules (linked to detailed maps), ultra-sonic scanners, a big number of
optical cameras, these can gather more useful information. Based on gathered information,
very complex situations can be estimated in a blink of an eye and the appropriate decision can
be taken – for instance, the car might detect in real time all moving cars nearby and their
velocity, can estimate their trajectories and make an avoiding maneuver if there is a threat of

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impact. The potential to gather information is limitless and so is the complexity and accuracy
of decisions taken based on this information.
An important relief for people would be to know that the software can be designed
and constantly updated according to their representations of both ethics and safety. The so-
called "morals" and safety rules of the vehicles as well as the software upgrades to these can
be evaluated and transparently debated by society before the vehicles/ or upgrades to their
software are released, limiting concerns and helping to avoid unpleasant surprises (Holstein
et al. 2). Given the number of different manufacturers of software for autonomous cars, there
is the need to strictly define the boundaries of decision making so that the “moral” of the car
is not solely up to the manufacturer, given the delicate issues that can arise – for instance,
some manufacturers might think that sacrificing the driver to save a group of people ahead is
ok, while others might disagree (Holstein et al. 1). Implementing these universal boundaries/
framework might be achieved by an independent regulatory organization (Holstein et al. 4).
In turn, this organization or the lawmakers involved should interact closely with the public
and survey its opinion with regard to the matter.
There are a few recent instances when autonomous vehicles have been involved in
accidents, some of which have even ended in deaths (Holstein et al. 1). However, as stated by
CEO of TESLA, Elon Musk, during a Ted 2017 talk, the real question is “how much better
does an autonomy need to be than a person’s before you can rely on it” ("Elon Musk
Describes"). Indeed, if autonomous vehicles become twice as good as people are, this is
already a very serious reason to adopt them regardless of the imperfections (given the number
of lives these would save).
It would likely never be possible to avoid all existing risks associated with
autonomous driving, but it is obvious that autonomous cars can be much better than human
drivers. These can gather several types of data from a multitude of sensors, but also can

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communicate with the surrounding infrastructure, their central database, and other vehicles to
take individual or collective life-saving decisions. Of course, society should have leverage
over the principles governing the behavior of these cars (as implemented by manufacturers).

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Works Cited
Elon Musk Describes Tesla’s Approach to Self-Driving at TED 2017. 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQh3_c6OLRU.
Holstein, Tobias et al. "Ethical and Social Aspects of Self-Driving Cars". Arxiv.Org, 2018,
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04103.pdf.
Thrun, Sebastian. "Toward Robotic Cars". Communications of The ACM, vol 53, no. 4, 2010,
p. 99. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), doi:10.1145/1721654.1721679.