Jordan McGillis of the Manhattan Institute writes about the lives that would be saved with self-driving cars:
As happens around 100 times each day in America, a car’s human driver had caused a fatal collision. Due to distraction, inebriation, incapacitation, malice, or just plain incompetence, human drivers caused collisions resulting in the deaths of more than 40,000 people in the United States last year, the highest number of roadway fatalities recorded in more than a decade according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) statistics. With 2021’s troubling uptick, the cumulative number of Americans killed by motor vehicles has climbed to well over 4 million since we first put cars on our roads over a century ago. In 94 percent of roadway collisions, the NHTSA says, drivers are to blame.
Self-driving cars offer hope that this seemingly endless series of tragedies might come to an end (or something close to it). Where human drivers succumb to physical and psychological weakness by nature, self-driving cars are immune. Instead of human perception, reaction, and will, the cars coming soon will be controlled by sensors and software that far outstrip our human levels of focus and decision-making. According to Mercatus Center estimates, these systems could prevent millions of car crashes annually and reduce the cost of insurance premiums by 90 percent, saving Americans a total of $350 billion each trip around the sun.
Read the whole thing here.