Human drivers are reacting to the driving styles of self-driving cars.

Lets take a close look at some crucial driving statistics from last year entailing everyday conventional driving.

The driving-related stats of last year are an eye-opening and quite revealing instance of what likely happens when a significant element of prevailing traffic conditions gets demonstratively altered.

Due to the pandemic, there was a lot less traffic last year, logically so. You would naturally assume that this would ergo suggest that there would be lowered number of car crash fatalities since there is much less traffic all told. Indeed, the count of car crash fatalities did decrease, though only by a slim difference of about 2% (not as much a decrease as might be expected).

Meanwhile, heres the twist to the statistical intrigue.

Despite the sizable drop in the volume of cars on the roadways and the modest drop in the count of related fatalities, the car crash fatality rate per miles driven rose by about 18% reaching a level of 1.25 car-related crash deaths per 100 million vehicle miles (it was approximately 1.06 the prior year).

In short, the frequency of getting into a death producing car crash was greatly enhanced.

Thats bad.

Thats real bad.

The stats almost seem like one of those oddball paradoxes. There was less overall traffic and fewer (somewhat) driving-related fatalities, and yet at the same time, there was a humongous jump in the frequency of car crash deaths per miles driven.

Why did this happen?

The explanation that seems most sensible is that for those drivers behind the steering wheel during the pandemic time period, it was readily feasible to drive at higher speeds due to the lessened traffic in their way.

Yes, that indubitably makes sense.

And by going faster, they tended to suffer mightily when getting into a car crash, which is a usual outcome of high speeds and the consequences of car accidents. There is also the added chances of actually getting into a car accident per se since there is less time to react and it becomes problematic to avoid being embroiled in a crash when such an emerging moment arises.

Some pundits have characterized the presumed phenomena as indictive that people will drive recklessly, including and especially speeding if they are given an opportunity to do so.

Intuitively this all makes sense, albeit a sad commentary on human behavior and the role of driving a car (as a side note, alternative explanations include the possibility of selection bias due to the types of drivers on the roads during the pandemic versus pre-pandemic, etc.).

In a more Utopian world, it could have been that the drivers during the pandemic were keenly aware of the frailty of existence and therefore would drive extraordinarily safely and with extreme caution. They would undertake the driving task in an abundantly lawful and cautious way. No speeding. There presumably would be no need to speed since the roads were ostensibly more open and traffic flow was smoother and closer to allowable maximum speeds than is usually the case.

The reality seems to be that the reaction of some drivers was that the lessened traffic meant that the roadways were wide open for driving like a racecar driver. Put the pedal to the metal. Punch it and let those tires peel.

I dont want to appear to be saying that all drivers did this. Assuredly, some drivers undoubtedly drove safely, perhaps even more safely than normal. For those drivers, thanks for being a mindful user of the highways and byways.

For those drivers that seemed to abuse the advantage of less traffic, well divide them into two camps.

One group of such drivers would be those that drove faster by happenstance and were somewhat lulled into being a less safe driver. They found themselves going faster and faster, not aware of the potential consequences. The roads were open. Open roads allow for going fast. In fact, they might argue that they werent aware of how fast they were going since there wasnt traffic that they were passing during the driving journey. We all know how easy it is to incur highway hypnosis whereby you become a mental zombie that becomes entrenched while at the driving controls.

In short, they didnt know any better.

The other group of drivers will be labeled herein as roadway aggressors (Im being exceedingly polite and shall mildly note that cruder terminology characterizing these drivers is often used).

These are people that will exploit any traffic condition, regardless of packed lanes versus empty lanes. When the roads are jammed with cars, these drivers are nonetheless going to weave in and out of traffic and do whatever they can to make progress. Imagine their glee when there is less traffic on the roadway. You might as well have declared that NASCAR racing is now allowed on the nations highways. Since they were no longer confined to their traffic congestion driving skills, the aggressors opted to employ freewheel driving acumen and relished the rabid excitement of doing so.

In short, they knew better but consciously chose to be exploitive.

Does it matter that there were two camps?

Somewhat, to the degree that it would be relatively easy to raise the awareness of the segment that didnt know any better and perhaps get them to tone things down and drive more cautiously. The aggressor group is seemingly immune to being told to slow down and take things more mindfully. Someone that has that in-your-face driving attitude is usually shaped only by getting caught red-handed, nailed by the police for speeding and driving recklessly. Of those that get caught, some wont even learn to adjust their driving and will instead try to find better ways to avoid getting nabbed.

Shifting gears, the future of cars involves the advent of self-driving cars.

An important consideration about the emergence of AI-based true self-driving cars is how human drivers will react or respond to having self-driving cars intermixing on the roadways with humanity. Few are putting much thought into the possible reactions by human drivers to driving next to and with nearby self-driving cars.

The driving stats about the pandemic showcase that humans alter their driving behaviors depending upon the traffic circumstances.

Heres an interesting question to ponder: Will the advent of AI-based true self-driving cars prod or spur nearby human drivers to drive differently?

Lets unpack the matter and see.

Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isnt any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-ons that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we dont yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).

Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars wont be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so theres not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as youll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).

For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect thats been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Self-Driving Cars And Nearby Human Drivers

For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there wont be a human driver involved in the driving task.

All occupants will be passengers.

The AI is doing the driving.

This bodes for exciting times.

The hope is that there will be a lot fewer car crashes due to the AI doing the driving. AI driving systems are not going to drink and drive. AI driving systems are not going to drive in a distracted manner. The focus entirely of the AI driving system is devoted to driving the car. Human drivers are apt to drive while intoxicated or drive while watching cat videos. Right now, there are about 40,000 car crash-related fatalities annually in the United States and an estimated 2.3 million related injuries to people (see my analysis of driving stats at this link here).

Some believe that the number of fatalities will drop to zero because of self-driving cars, but Ive debunked this claim and exhorted repeatedly that there is a zero chance of zero fatalities (see the link here). The physics of a car and the driving task will inevitably lead to some amount of car crashes and deaths, even including the use of self-driving cars. That being said, the deaths and injuries will inevitably be significantly lessened (every life spared is decidedly notable), and the number of self-driving car specific crashes will be much lower than conventional driving.

One assumption that some people keep making is that there will be a magical overnight switcheroo of us driving conventional cars to suddenly having all and only self-driving cars on our roadways.

Thats just not sensible.

The introduction of AI-based true self-driving cars is going to be quite gradual. It will take years upon years for the amount of traffic to shift toward being self-driving cars versus being undertaken by conventional human-driven cars. There are about 250 million conventional cars in the U.S. today and those cars are not going to simply disappear out of thin air. They will continue to be used and there will be an ongoing mix of both human-driven cars and self-driving cars on our roadways.

As an aside, there is a brewing controversy associated with the potential extinction of human driving.

If you believe that self-driving cars are going to radically reduce bad driving, and save lives, the natural assertion is that human-driven cars ought to be outlawed and banned from our roadways. This is an extreme viewpoint in certainly the short-term as it will take many years, likely decades, for enough self-driving cars to be produced and made available to meet our driving journey needs.

Some oppose the idea of banning human driving. This idea of disallowing human driving seems altogether Dystopian to them. Driving is considered a privilege, but many see it as a basic human right. There are passionate debates on this topic, including those that say you will only get them to give up their driving when you pry their cold dead hands from the steering wheel.

Putting aside that controversy for the moment, well focus herein on the reality that there will be an intermixing of self-driving cars and human-driven cars on our roadways, which will exist for quite a while.

Hopefully, we can all agree to that at face value.

You might be thinking that there is no difference between how humans drive today and how they will drive whence there are self-driving cars on the roadways, thus, mixing together self-driving cars and human-driven cars is a non-issue and without any semblance of hullabaloo.

I dont think such an assumption is fully thought through.

Ill explain why in a moment.

Before we get into the details, when referring to the mixture of self-driving cars and human-driven cars, keep in mind that the proportions are going to adjust over a moderated time period. For example, we might begin with less than 1% of the total cars on the roads being self-driving cars, and the rest of the 99% consists of human-driven cars. At some time thereafter, the proportion will shift and become (lets say) about 20% of self-driving cars and 80% of human-driven cars. This will continue adjusting, eventually reaching 50/50, then tipping toward more self-driving cars than there are self-driving cars.

On a somewhat finer technical point, the number of vehicles is not as vital as the number of miles driven. I say this because it is anticipated that self-driving cars might be operating 24x7, continually underway and only rarely not in motion, while a conventional human-driven car sits unused for about 95% or more of its available time. Rather than comparing the number of vehicles, it is usually preferred to compare based on miles driven, a more universal metric.

Okay, we will have self-driving cars on our roadways and they will gradually become more prominent and in a sense more dominant in terms of the likely volume of traffic activity.

How will those human drivers react?

If a self-driving car drove in precisely the same manner as a human driver, the easy answer is that there would presumably be no difference in how human drivers will be driving. The human drivers would ostensibly not even realize that the car ahead of them is a self-driving car (well, perhaps the sensory gear is a telltale sign, but even that is getting streamlined and all cars might eventually have the same overall appearance, both human-driven, and self-driving).

You would drive as you do today.

Most of the time, you know nothing whatsoever about the drivers in the other cars nearby to you. All that you know is that they are driving a car and the car is nearby. You attempt to infer what kind of a driver they are by observing their driving. You rarely observe them directly as a human being, and instead, you watch how their car moves and maneuvers. From the actions of their car, you might ascribe some beliefs to the type of person they are, though this is just a guess and based on the driving that you see, and not by having sat with them over a cup of coffee and discussed global politics and the like.

Overall, the point is that if self-driving cars could drive in exactly the same manner as human drivers, the human drivers on the roadways with self-driving cars would not have any apparent means to realize that there are some cars around them being driven by humans and some being driven by an AI driving system (all else being equal).

The thing is, at least right now, self-driving cars arent driving exactly like humans.

For example, by-and-large the automakers and self-driving tech firms are programming their self-driving cars to always drive in a fully legal manner. This means that there is no speeding allowed. The AI driving system is supposed to adhere to whatever posted speed limit exists in any passage of roadway.

I ask you, do humans always abide by the speed limits?

Unless youve never been on the road, you would for sure acknowledge that human drivers are apt to go faster than the speed limit. Routinely so. This is true not only on highways and freeways, it happens in places you would think it absolutely ought to not occur, such as in school ground zones. Yes, people drive past the speed limit on all manner of occasions.

This lambasting of human drivers is not intended as a rebuke of human driving (though it certainly has that edge), and instead simply emphasizes that there is an already pronounced difference between todays self-driving cars and the nature of human drivers, namely, self-driving cars abide by the speed limit, while human drivers will often speed.

There are other ways in which self-driving cars are driving differently than human drivers, right now, but I wont belabor that point and merely establish that speeding is one of many such differences. Speeding is a big one since it is highly noticeable.

Heres what sometimes happens when a human driver encounters a self-driving car on todays roadways.

There is a self-driving car up ahead of a human driver. For human drivers that have already seen self-driving cars, they know that the self-driving car is going to strictly abide by the speed limit.

In theory, if you are behind a self-driving car that is going the speed limit, you ought to keep your proper driving distance and also be going the speed limit, matching whatever speed the self-driving car is doing. This would be the proper and sensible way for a human to drive.

Sure, some human drivers will do that.

Unfortunately, some human drivers wont tolerate those darned slow-poke self-driving cars. It is almost the same as coming up behind a car that has a bright sticker saying it is a student driver. You know that means the car is going to do the speed limit, stop at all stop signs, allow pedestrians to fully cross the road, etc. This can be infuriating to those drivers that prefer the more assertive style of driving.

What do such drivers do when encountering a driving school teenage driver?

Many of these aggressive drivers decide to take matters into their own hands. They realize that driving on the bumper of the novice driver wont do much good and only makes the student driver nervous, likely sparking them to go even more slowly. So, the best option would be to circumvent that driver. Drive around them. Furthermore, since the driver has caused you to suffer a delay, the odds are that when you drive around them, you are going to speed-up to compensate for the exasperating delay.

This is the same reaction that those aggressive drivers are having when coming upon a self-driving car.

The reaction involves consternation that they are perhaps once again stuck behind a strict law-abiding self-driving car. The human driver anticipates that the AI driving system will proceed purely at the speed limit and no more so, it will stop fully at stop signs, and so on. This is going to be a huge inconvenience and not to be tolerated.

Thus, aggressive drivers go around the self-driving car. They sometimes rocket past, wanting to make up for a lost time while having followed behind the self-driving car. The irony, of sorts, would be that these aggressive drivers are likely to speed, more than usual, based on their belief that they need to overcome the delay while having been behind the self-driving car.

Remember earlier the point made that human drivers would adjust their driving behavior depending upon the traffic conditions?

Well, a self-driving car is changing the driving conditions.

Currently, a self-driving car is driving in a legal manner that is generally unlike the driving of many human drivers. There are so few self-driving cars on the roadways that this is not especially evident as yet. Only those people that perchance live in an area where self-driving cars are being fielded would have experienced this phenomenon.

Also, the phenomenon is only in the small at this time since few self-driving cars are being used on the roadways. Imagine that once there is a significant proportion of self-driving cars on the roads, this would become a quite pronounced difference between the way that self-driving cars drive and the way that human drivers drive.

Presumably, there will be those human drivers that opt to cope with self-driving cars by doing all kinds of reckless driving and speeding too. Some of those human drivers will be like those mentioned earlier that are unaware of how they are reacting to self-driving cars. They will be doing so without the realization that is doing so. Youll also have the other camp. Those are the aggressive drivers that will be gunning for self-driving cars in the sense of the moment they spot one, they will go into their super-aggressive human driving mode.

One facet is that if an aggressive driver did something untoward related to another human-driven car, there is a chance that the other driver will react adversely. This happens quite frequently, at times leading to road rage.

Will a self-driving car be irked by these aggressive drivers and go into a road rage mode?

No, it seems highly unlikely.

This would be a possibility if programmed to react that way, though it seems hard to imagine that automakers and self-driving tech firms are going to include a road rage mode into their AI driving systems (a dicey idea).

Recall that I mentioned there are other differences between an AI driving system and human driving?

Believe it or not, the aspect that the AI wont go into road rage mode is yet another difference. A subtle one, for sure, but demonstrative. Human drivers that realize the self-driving car will not react to nearby bad driving or will react submissively, are more than happy to exploit this difference (spurring the humans toward further reckless driving acts).

Conclusion

What to do about this conundrum?

One reply is that this proves that human drivers have to be given the heave-ho. Get rid of human drivers and this problem is solved.

Another perspective is that self-driving cars should be programmed to be aggressive drivers and thus be more human-like in how the driving is taking place. If humans are speeding, by gosh, the AI driving systems should be doing the same. Mimic human driving and then all drivers will essentially be on the same playing field.

Thats a quite abhorrent notion for many, since the concept of having self-driving cars drive as atrociously as human drivers send shivers up the spine and would seem to undercut the hoped-for benefits of having self-driving cars.

Time will tell.

Meanwhile, if you see a self-driving car coming down the street, be prepared for not what the self-driving car will do, but instead for what the human drivers nearby the self-driving car will do. Those pesky and inconsiderate human drivers will do what they do, including and especially when they come upon a self-driving car.

See the article here:
Self-Driving Cars Spurring Nearby Human Drivers Into Speeding And Abysmal Reckless Driving - Forbes