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Road safety, health inequity and the imminence of autonomous vehicles

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 3, pages 654–655 (2021)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Although personal vehicle ownership facilitates economic mobility, negative externalities persist. In the United States, motor vehicle (MV) fatalities represent almost four out of every ten ‘unintentional injury’ deaths — deaths that do not result from old age, disease, homicide or suicide1. Globally, MV injuries are estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death for all age groups and the leading cause of death for children and young people 5–29 years of age2.

Autonomous vehicles (AV) technologies promise relief. By shifting responsibility for higher-order control functions from humans to machines, these systems are envisioned to reduce road fatalities by eliminating driver-related errors blamed in most automobile crashes. From the vantage point of public health, the overarching goal of AV technology is to transform the current approach to automotive safety from injury reduction post collision to complete collision prevention3,4. Doing so would — by some accounts — rank among the most transformative public-health initiatives in human history.

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Acknowledgements

A.N. was supported through funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (award #2020-14048) and the National Science Foundation via its program on the Future of Work at the Human–Technology Frontier (award #1928616, FW-HTF-P: Impact of AI Robotics on Labor).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Ashley Nunes

  2. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Kay W. Axhausen

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  1. Ashley Nunes
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Correspondence to Ashley Nunes.

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Nunes, A., Axhausen, K.W. Road safety, health inequity and the imminence of autonomous vehicles. Nat Mach Intell 3, 654–655 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00382-3

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