NEWS
Matt Prior
TESTER’S NOTES
Who was to blame for this flip? Well, it was definitely a human
Who is to blame for crashes? Astudy by the US’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggested the “critical reason” was “the driver” in 94% of cases – a statistic that has been misused by various advocates and enthusiasts of driver assistance, autonomous vehicles and LinkedIn over the years to the point that the NHTSA today goes to great lengths to qualify its findings.
The survey was big: it sampled 5470 crashes between 2005 and 2007. In its results, the NHTSA defined the ‘critical reason’ as ‘the last event in the crash causal chain’. Ergo driver actions weren’t necessarily the root cause but were the last significant event before impact. Yet nearly two decades on, people will tell you that if you automate driving or remove ‘human error’, you will prevent more than nine in 10 crashes.