I look forward to 'Zero Accidents' in a world with autonomous vehicles.

Approximately 1.2 million people die as a result of car accidents worldwide every year. In an editorial, a writer from British newspaper The Sunday Times calls cars “deadly weapons [that] travel at subsonic speeds and have wheels,” and compares this resulting “slaughter of young people” to war.

In the US alone 5.5 million road traffic accidents occur each year, with ninety-three percent caused by human error (a similar proportion as in Europe). On top of the obvious dangers, the act of driving – single-mindedly steering a vehicle at a regulated, steady-pace along a highway or city street – has become an excruciatingly monotonous activity in a world where we are accustomed to multi-tasking at home or at work. As a result, drivers focus on other activities and take great liberties in doing things simultaneously; texting, talking on the phone, fiddling with navigation systems and even worse. Distractions, poor judgment and alcohol are leading factors in automobile accidents, with an annual economic cost of $300 billion, according to the Eno Center for Transportation.

Robots programmed to undertake tedious repetitive activities are able to address these issues. In cities such as Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris, London, Budapest, Sao Paolo, Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and at more than a dozen airports in North America as well as various Disneyworld sites, millions of people are already efficiently and safely transported from one place to another by driverless trains. Recognizing this helps us begin to overcome the notion that we are somehow more capable than machines at standardized tasks (like driving the same few miles to work every day).

For many people the gut reaction to driverless cars is distrust and denial: ‘No robot could ever do what I do on the streets’. Yet we accept that robots are able to make pre-programmed decisions more quickly and efficiently than humans in other areas of our lives. We know that they are more proficient and exacting in manufacturing facilities. We use them in one form or another whenever we order goods online. We have even started accepting them into our homes, letting them loose as we sleep – iRobot and Dyson each make vacuum-cleaning robots that suck up our mess overnight.

Even dairy farmers have come to accept that milking cows and filling up milk bottles with their hands takes too much time in comparison to an automated system. Similarly, large-scale farmers have also accepted autonomously-driving tractors to plough fields (John Deere, Fendt and Case all offer such machines). Perhaps urban-dwellers can learn to embrace robotics like our rural friends?

Let's begin to accept that in fact machines are better than most drivers: they do not need to sleep, eat, chat, tweet, text, or indulge in any other activity like so many people do while behind the wheel of a two-ton killing machine.

Adapted from The Mobility Revolution: Zero Emissions, Zero Accidents, Zero Ownership, available from January 2015 as an eBook and in Paperback.

UPDATE: Following my initial post and image, please see Daimler's view of the mobility revolution, presented at the CES: Daimler - Car and Driver

For more information: Three Zeroes.