Koopman believes that the safety hype around AVs is exaggerated. “There’s nothing I’ve seen showing whether AVs will be safer than humans in the short to medium term,” he says. “Machine learning is brittle, and it struggles with things it hasn’t seen before.” …

If road safety is the goal, there are already plenty of available technologies that automakers could invest in, rather than leapfrogging to fully autonomous vehicles. Take advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS), such as automatic emergency braking and pedestrian detection. Such features have already been shown to save lives, but their capabilities vary wildly from one model to another — assuming they’re available at all. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, automatic emergency braking wasn’t installed on 57 percent of the vehicles produced by Stellantis or 42 percent of those from GM during the 12 months ending last Aug. 31. Improving and standardizing ADAS is relatively low-hanging fruit compared with building self-driving cars, with more assured safety benefits.