Spillover benefits of adopting self-driving cars: a reduction in emissions

By Siddharth Singh, 13th July, 2015

One key advantage of adopting self-driving cars (as and when they are road-ready) is a possible reduction in accidents — and fatalities that result from accidents. The World Health Organisation in the Global Status Report on Road Safety (2013) estimated that 1.24 million people were killed globally in traffic accidents in 2010. This number is unacceptably high — one that makes road accident related fatalities higher than most wars and disease.

A glimpse of the possible fall in accidents comes from Google, which has been testing its automated cars on private and public roads since 2009. Its 32 cars have driven over 1.8 million miles but have been involved in 12 accidents, none of which led to fatalities or injuries. Importantly, none of the 12 accidents were caused by the self-driving cars themselves: they were all a result of human error from human driven cars.

While the pursuit of safer roads is an important goal, Spectrum reports that self-driven taxis can trigger significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

“Based off of a forecast of U.S. car emissions and gasoline prices in 2030, sustainable energy researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, found that the emissions of a self-driving taxi would be 63 to 82 percent lower than those of a privately owned hybrid electric car, and 90 percent lower than today’s privately owned gasoline cars.

If just five percent — or 800,000 — vehicles in 2030, were converted to robo-taxis, it would save 7 million barrels of oil per year and reduce up to 2.4 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year.”

That’s a significant amount of emissions reductions. Transport sector forecasters will have to explore the inclusion of such a variable into their models.

Siddharth can be followed on Twitter @siddharth3