Abstract
As a law professor who studies mobility, I spend many waking hours thinking about fully automated vehicles, those cars that drive themselves without any need for a human operator. As a true believer in this technology, I think the widespread deployment of these vehicles will get more people home safely, give commuters their time back, and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our environment. However, lately, I worry whether this will ever happen. A recent Pew study showed that only 26% of the U.S. public believes that self-driving cars are a good thing for society, which is an all-time low. To the public, the deployment of automated vehicle technology seems rushed, inconvenient, and dangerous. The more I hear from people outside of the mobility industry, the more it feels like the industry is focused on creating a solution in search of a problem.
Yet a problem exists. Nearly 40,000 people will die on the road this year in the U.S. alone, with human error as a causal factor in the majority of those crashes. We will spend hundreds of billions of dollars repairing the damage to people and property caused by vehicular collisions. People will waste weeks of their lives in unnecessary traffic. Knowing this, I wonder why there is a disconnect between society’s desire to address this problem and its receptiveness to the solution of automated driving technology. Developing the technology is hard, but why does getting people to believe in the promise of the technology seem just as hard? In pondering this question, I turned to a mobility industry that incorporates a high degree of automation, yet still enjoys the public trust: aviation, the safest mode of transportation in existence.
Recommended Citation
Tifani Sadek,
Keep the Driver in Driverless Cars: Let's Take a Few Cues from the Aviation Industry,
2024
J. L. & MOB.
1
Available at:
https://repository.law.umich.edu/jlm/vol2024/iss1/1
Included in
Air and Space Law Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons, Transportation Law Commons