Road users will not gain the full safety benefits of self-driving cars until every car on the road is connected to each other, according to UK road safety charity IAM RoadSmart.
This view has now been backed up by a whitepaper produced by experts at the University of Michigan called Sensor Fusion: A Comparison of Sensing Capabilities of Human Drivers and Highly Automated Vehicles.
“The ultimate win-win situation is a place where information from each vehicle is shared with the vehicles around it, add that to human experience born from a lifetime of ‘trial and error’ and you have the ideal double-act to spot crashes before they happen,” said Neil Greig, IAM RoadSmart director of policy and research.
IAM RoadSmart believes that the human mind holds the edge, until a time when connected cars are able to ‘talk’ to each other and predict what is happening over the horizon.
Whitepaper author Brandon Schottle pointed out a number of circumstances in which both human capability and a connected vehicle’s perception can be compromised – thus increasing the need for each party to work together – such as extreme weather, excessive dirt or physical obstructions, darkness or low illumination, large physical obstructions and dense traffic.
“Machines/computers are generally well suited to perform tasks like driving, especially in regard to reaction time (speed), power output and control, consistency, and multichannel information processing,” he said. “Human drivers still generally maintain an advantage in terms of reasoning, perception, and sensing when driving. While no single sensor completely equals human sensing capabilities, some offer capabilities not possible for a human driver.”
