Wisdom of cars key to fewer road deaths
lights, traffic lights, road signs, lane-marker bumps, or metal embedded in road paint. Alongside car-to-car communication, the autodrive software receives continual environmental feedback.
The data received can then be transmitted to a centralised data store and made available to all other cars. Then, once one linked car drives along an unmapped road, all subsequent cars can access detailed data on that road, and road workers can use wireless chipped cones to map out roadwork diversions. This is like providing the blind person with eyes – suddenly the road becomes alive with
data. Crash rates will plummet.
The role of the government in achieving zero road deaths then becomes obvious. First, it needs to start incorporating telematic chips in the road environment. Second, it needs to establish a centralised database for semi-autonomous vehicles to link to. Third, it must regulate so that all vehicle manufacturers are required to link to that system and exchange traffic data. Finally, it needs to encourage fast introduction of 80 per cent technology vehicles to break New Zealand’s habit of importing old-tech cars.
Over time, this huge database of real-time information on the movements of cars will lead to algorithms that make autonomous cars far safer than any human driver. The system will treat cars driven by humans as dangerous, giving them a wide berth. Research in other areas implies that, once about 40 per cent of cars are softwarecontrolled, it becomes hard for manual-drive cars to crash into another car, and crash rates fall sharply.
Projections suggest that, by 2022, human drivers may be 10 times more unsafe than 90 per cent autodrive cars. At that point governments may start to restrict the rights of humans to drive.
And the benefits are not limited to improving crash rates. Networked cars and the traffic management systems can share information in a way that allows the group to mutually choose traffic routes that minimise total traffic, or to move faster as co-ordinated groups. Traffic police will be able to issue general instructions to all cars in an area if a diversion is needed, or to stop cars they have suspicions about.
The collective wisdom of cars will vastly exceed what any individual driver can achieve.