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Originally Posted by Germanauto
I'm not in the pro-autonomous car bandwagon but (a) we don't know all the circumstances and (b) I'm sure that statistically speaking self-driving cars cause fewer accidents/fatalities than human operated cars.
Media will blow this out of proportion as usual.
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No doubt there is potential for it to get blown out of proportion. I think there are something like 5,000 pedestrians killed by cars per year. Of course, there are far more non-autonomous vehicles driving far more miles than autonomous vehicles but the fact remains pedestrians get killed by cars many times every day. Interesting to see Uber's reaction to this accident though.
I think the media works both ways, though. While autonomous vehicles have the potential to be far safer, they are really a work in process at this point - effectively using public roads for beta testing. I think the media makes it sound like they are closer to ready for prime time than they actually are. I also think it will be more difficult to integrate autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles than forcing everything to be autonomous. So aside from technology, I think there are many social, economic and infrastructure challenges that will take longer to solve than media would lead us to believe.