Get Ready for Freeways That Ban Human Drivers
- Driver-free zones may arrive in city centers in five years
- ‘These vehicles will drive better than any human possibly can’
QuickTake: Auto Industry Push for Self-Driving Cars
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New rules of the road for robot cars coming out of Washington this week could lead to the eventual extinction of one of the defining archetypes of the past century: the human driver.
While banning people from driving may seem like something from a Kurt Vonnegut short story, it’s the logical endgame of a technology that could dramatically reduce -- or even eliminate -- the 1.25 million road deaths a year globally. Human error is the cause of 94 percent of roadway fatalities, U.S. safety regulators say, and robot drivers never get drunk, sleepy or distracted.