One of the reasons why self-driving vehicles might be better than one driven by humans is safety. This is because computers make all the split-second decisions and can sometimes detect things we did not know was there, or because we did not pay enough attention to the road.
Ultimately this means less accidents on the road, and also means less traffic congestions since all cars will know where they need to go and drivers don’t have to second guess themselves. In fact a recent experiment conducted by researchers over at the University of Illinois has proven that self-driving cars can indeed reduce traffic, which you can see in the video above.
Basically what the researchers have done is that they introduced just a single self-driving car into a fleet of cars, and found that one self-driving car was enough to reduce traffic. Not only did this help alleviate traffic, but it was also found that fuel consumption had gone down as the self-driving car was capable of driving more efficiently thanks to the sensors on board that allowed it to know when to brake, how much to brake, and so on.
Speaking to Phys.org, Daniel Work, a lead researcher in the study said, “Our experiments show that with as few as five percent of vehicles being automated and carefully controlled, we can eliminate stop-and-go waves caused by human driving behaviour.” That being said, we’re probably still quite some time away from being able to see self-driving cars become commercially available, but if this video is any indication, it will be worth the wait.
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