Makers of self-driving cars see safer future despite fatality
Makers of autonomous vehicles yesterday said there is still work to be done to make them safer in the wake of a fatality, but they insisted self-driving cars still offer the best hope of reducing the nearly 40,000 traffic deaths in the U.S. each year.
“Autonomous vehicles should prove to be far safer on the road,” Jeff Adams, president of the New England chapter of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, said at the group’s autonomous vehicle summit in Cambridge. “Generally, the software doesn’t take a coffee break or look down at its Twitter account.”
Two companies have resumed tests of their selfdriving vehicles in Boston’s Seaport District since Mayor Martin J. Walsh urged them to suspend testing last month after a pedestrian was killed in Tempe, Ariz., by an Uber autonomous vehicle that had a “safety driver” behind the steering wheel.
“You start in a confined area and expand over time,” said Ryan Chin, co-founder of one of the companies, Optimus Ride. “We’re not quite there yet on being able to drive everywhere.”
In the Seaport District, both Optimus Ride and nuTonomy vehicles travel no more than 25 mph and have both a safety driver and a software operator or test engineer.
“Boston is maybe the hardest place to drive in the developed world,” said Matt Wansley, nuTonomy general counsel. But eventually, he said, the company’s self-driving cars should be able to operate in places like Mumbai, where cars have to navigate around pedestrians and rickshaws.
Once autonomous vehicles have become that safe, Chin said, the federal government will have to determine how they can travel across states that have different regulations.
“Many of the regulators don’t understand the technology,” he said.