Remember all those rosy predictions of a day sometime in the near future when cars would drive themselves -- safely, reliably and with a minimum of oversight? Whatever became of that promise?
The easy answer is that private industrial barons like Elon Musk took the idea and produced a series of cars that weren't able to operate safely without a human on board. So does that mean the idea is dead?
It doesn't. In fact, scientists, safety advocates and bureaucrats are still working on the concept. With more than 46,000 traffic fatalities last year, it's an idea that needs to move more quickly towards becoming reality.
The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is hoping to do just that with a newly released report that lays the groundwork for harnessing wireless technology to save lives and reduce accidents.
The technology that's being developed is called V2X, which translates to "Vehicle to Everything." Current self-driving Tesla-like schemes use cameras, radar and digitized maps to enable cars to sort of bumble along, hoping they don't hit anything, a process that experience has shown is far from perfect.
"Self-driving" cars
According to the National Law Review, self-driving cars have a higher accident rate than traditional vehicles, with 9.1 crashes per million miles driven compared to 4.1 for conventional vehicles.
A 2022 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that 273 crashes involving Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) were Teslas, with Honda reporting the next highest number of crashes at 90. Subaru was third with 10.
The study also found that accidents involving ADAS vehicles are more likely to occur during dawn/dusk or when turning, and that rear-end collisions are the most common type of accident.
Drilling down a little deeper, we find that autonomous vehicles perform better in some types of accidents than in others.
What's better about V2X?
With V2X, on the other hand, everything "talks" with everything else, like this:
- Self-driving focuses on making individual vehicles more intelligent and capable of navigating autonomously.
- V2X aims to create a connected ecosystem where vehicles and infrastructure share information to enhance overall safety and efficiency.
As the National Safety Council explains it: "V2X technology allows vehicles to wirelessly communicate with other vehicles, road users and roadway infrastructure to exchange information about their speed and position, traffic, road conditions and other factors that can impact safety.
"The deployment of this technology, in combination with advanced driver-assistance technologies including automatic emergency braking, are critical components of advancing the safer vehicles pillar of the Safe System Approach," the council says.
The good news here is that the V2X technology is "mature," according to experts who say it is well-thought-out and already successfully being used in some test locations.
They can work together
Better yet, the two technologies are not mutually exclusive; they can be combined to work even more effectively together than they could alone.
For example, a self-driving car equipped with V2X capabilities would have a broader awareness of its surroundings, potentially making it safer and more efficient. In fact, many experts believe that a combination of these technologies will be essential for achieving fully autonomous driving in the future.
China has already put the pedal to the metal, ruling that cars will need to have V2X capability to get a good safety rating, which effectively makes it mandatory. In the U.S., the University of Texas at Austin has several V2X demonstration projects running. One is the Texas Connected Freight Corridors (TCFC) project, which enables trucks and roadside units to communicate and make operations more efficient and safer.