Self-driving vehicles have the potential to save lives by preventing road accidents resulting from fatigue, distraction, failure to properly perceive the environment, overly aggressive driving, and other common mistakes. But road safety isn’t just about how you drive — it’s also about the types of vehicles we put on our roads and what’s inside of those vehicles.
For the past fifty years, vehicles have been getting much bigger and heavier and deadlier to vulnerable road users. Pedestrian deaths are now at their highest level in thirty years, and more than 36,000 Americans still die on our roads annually. We need to rethink vehicle designs and how we use vehicles to move people and goods for the world we want to live in. For Nuro, that means a world where streets are safer, emissions are eliminated, and people can affordably access the things they need.
That’s why we custom-designed a new kind of vehicle, R2, specifically for goods transportation. It is designed to keep what’s outside safer than what’s inside, with a lighter and narrower body and a front end optimized to protect others.
New research
Recently, we worked with the safety experts at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) to quantify the safety benefits of zero-occupant vehicle designs such as R2, over and above the substantial safety gains from autonomy software. In a new report, a team of VTTI researchers analyzed historic crash data to assess what would have happened with a different vehicle design, holding the driver’s behavior constant. They estimate that, for every mile of driving replaced by a zero-occupant design vehicle, the risk of fatality or injury can be reduced by approximately 60%.
VTTI examined five years of U.S. crashes that occurred on the types of roadways and in situations where zero-occupant vehicles are expected to operate and catalogued approximately 59,000 fatalities and 6 million injuries. They then estimated how zero-occupant designs would have affected the crash probability and severity, focusing on four factors:
The results
The results confirmed that a novel vehicle design can meaningfully improve safety. The researchers found that if a zero-occupant vehicle had replaced one vehicle in each of those crashes, they would reduce traffic fatalities by 58% and avoid or make less severe 62% of crash injuries, even without accounting for improved driving behavior.
Central to this reduction is the lack of passengers and drivers in zero-occupant vehicles. By making it convenient and affordable for goods to come to you, these vehicles take people out of harm’s way.
The innovative design of these new vehicles also substantially improved safety metrics according to the study. The study showed that a front end designed to absorb energy–rather than protect occupants–could reduce pedestrian risks by 20% or more in some crashes. Using a proprietary VTTI dataset with videos and telematics of over a thousand crashes, researchers also found that a narrower vehicle could avoid 5% of crashes by giving everyone on the road more space to maneuver. To our knowledge, this is the first time the safety benefits of vehicle width have been analyzed.
Just the start
We have long believed that autonomous driving systems will help keep drivers and passengers safer in their cars as they move around town visiting friends, going to work, and shopping. But that is only a part of the health and safety equation. If we want to bring transformational change to society, it’s time for us to think smaller.
Please read the full report about how narrower, lighter zero-occupant delivery vehicles can transform road safety and bring about healthier communities.
