Safety
Driving safety experts predict that once driverless technology has been fully developed, traffic collisions (and resulting deaths and injuries and costs), caused by human error, such as delayed reaction time, tailgating, rubbernecking, and other forms of distracted or aggressive driving should be substantially reduced. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimated that widespread use of autonomous vehicles could “eliminate 90% of all auto accidents in the United States, prevent up to US$190 billion in damages and health-costs annually and save thousands of lives.”
According to motorist website “TheDrive.com” operated by Time magazine, none of the driving safety experts they were able to contact were able to rank driving under an autopilot system at the time (2017) as having achieved a greater level of safety than traditional fully hands-on driving, so the degree to which these benefits asserted by proponents will manifest in practice cannot be assessed. Confou\cite{2009}nding factors that could reduce the net effect on safety may include unexpected interactions between humans and partly or fully automated vehicles, or between different types of vehicle system; complications at the boundaries of functionality at each automation level (such as handover when the vehicle reaches the limit of its capacity); the effect of the bugs and flaws that inevitably occur in complex interdependent software systems; sensor or data shortcomings; and successful compromise by malicious interveners.