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Why driverless cars will be safer than human drivers

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It might sound complicated, but when you think about it, it’s not that different from how humans learn.

When you were born, you didn’t know what anything was. But your parents or whoever raised you repeatedly pointed things out so that you could identify different objects and people.

Superhuman driving skills

Once a computer model is created, then it’s loaded into the car’s brain and hooked up to the rest of the car’s sensors to create real-world model of the car’s environment.

The car uses this model to make decisions about how it should respond in different situations. And because the car has sensors all around it, it has access to a lot more data than a human driver to help it make those decisions.

“There are insightful factors that get factored in. For example, if you are driving along and there’s a parked car with nobody in it, the vehicle will proceed next to that car,” Shapiro said.

“But if it sees the door is slightly open and there is somebody in it, well the expectation is that the door will open at any moment and someone will to try and get out of that car. So at that point, when the car senses that, it’s either going to slow down, or switch lanes if it can, and proceed with caution. And because it has a full 360 degrees view around the car, it can be tracking multiple objects, with much greater things happening, with much greater accuracy than any human.”

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Cadie Thompson
Cadie Thompson is the deputy news chief and executive editor at Business Insider. She oversees the business news desk, corporate, finance, leadership and careers, and legal affairs teams. Previously, she was the deputy executive editor of business news, overseeing all tech, media, transportation, and retail coverage. She also led the emerging tech team at Tech Insider.Before joining Insider, she worked as a technology editor and reporter at CNBC.