If driverless cars deliver on their promise to eliminate the vast
majority of fatal traffic accidents, the technology will rank among the
most transformative public-health initiatives in human history. But how
many lives, realistically, will be saved?
This is not merely theoretical. There’s already some precedent for
change of this magnitude in the realms of car culture and automotive
safety. In 1970, about 60,000 people died in traffic accidents in the
United States. A dramatic shift toward safety—including
required seat belts and ubiquitous airbags—helped vastly improve a
person’s chance of surviving the American roadways in the decades that
followed. By 2013, 32,719 people died in traffic crashes, a historic
low.
Researchers estimate that driverless cars could, by mid-century,
reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent. Which means that, using
the number of fatalities in 2013 as a baseline, self-driving cars could
save 29,447 lives a year. In the United States alone, that's nearly
300,000 fatalities prevented over the course of a decade, and 1.5
million lives saved in a half-century. For context: Anti-smoking efforts
saved 8 million lives in the United States over a 50-year period.
The life-saving estimates for driverless cars are on par with the
efficacy of modern vaccines, which save 42,000 lives for each U.S. birth
cohort, according to the Centres for Disease Control.
Globally, there are about 1.2 million traffic fatalities annually, according to
the World Health Organization. Which means driverless cars are poised
to save 10 million lives per decade—and 50 million lives around the
world in half a century.