Safety concerns hinder the advancement of driverless cars in the US

Traffic accidents resulting from failures in autonomous driving systems are posing an obstacle to the development of driverless cars in the United States, where some states already allow the circulation of fully autonomous vehicles. One of these states is California, where a woman was run over on October 2 by a person who fled the scene; the impact hurled the victim into the path of a driverless taxi which, instead of braking or performing evasion maneuvers, dragged her for 20 feet.

The accident was a serious blow to Cruise, the autonomous vehicle unit of General Motors, which fired nine top executives after it was found that they had withheld a key video of the accident from California regulators, as reported by Bloomberg. Although this is not the only incident in which Cruise has been involved, it was the one that forced the company to suspend its activities a little over a year after being granted permission to operate in California. It was also present in Texas and Arizona.

Cruise’s situation is no exception in the automotive industry. Tesla, the world’s leading electric car manufacturer, which has been promising fully autonomous vehicles for years, was forced this month to recall two million cars, practically all the Teslas currently on American roads.

The reason was that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) considered that Tesla’s driver-assistance system, Autopilot, does not do enough to ensure that drivers pay attention to what goes on around them. The system, which offers a certain level of autonomy, has caused several fatal accidents in recent years. One of them happened in 2019 when a man driving a Tesla in Autopilot mode crashed into a Honda Civic, causing the death of its two occupants. The NHTSA conducted a two-year investigation, analyzing 956 crashes in which Autopilot mode was used.

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