NTSB chief sees deadly transition to life-saving driverless cars

An Uber automated-vehicle takes a test-drive in Pittsburgh in May. Automated cars will improve road safety, but the transition will include some deadly accidents, National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Christopher Hart said Thursday. Photo by Jeff Swensen for The Washington Post.

Automation is the best way to improve road safety, but the technology also presents bigger challenges than most realize, National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Christopher Hart said Thursday.

The transition will include some deadly accidents, Hart said during an appearance at the National Press Club. But he expects the march to continue – and thinks it should, since done right it will be much better than the status quo.

“There will be fatal crashes, that’s for sure,” Hart said. But “this train has left the station.”

Rolling back opportunities for human error can sharply reduce the U.S.’s more than 32,000 yearly road deaths, Hart said, noting that that figure saw a troubling uptick in 2015.

- FWBP Digital Partners -

One tool to help the transition: event recorders along the lines of the “black boxes” used in airplanes, he said.

“We would encourage the use of robust on-board event recorders to help the process,” Hart said, noting that strict privacy protections can and must be put in place. “The more the industry knows from the event recorders about what went right and what went wrong, the more the industry will be able to fashion remedies that effectively address the problems.”

Hart said earlier, deadly automation failures on Washington Metrorail trains and in airline cockpits demonstrate the potential perils, and offer lessons as driverless cars multiply on neighborhood streets and highways.

“The theory of removing human error by removing the human assumes the automation is working as designed,” Hart said. But when that technology fails, “will it fail in a way that is safe? Will the operator be aware of the failure in a timely manner?”

- Advertisement -

Success will take cooperation among public and private sectors, as was done in cutting deadly airline crashes, he said.

Perhaps the biggest challenge will be in the transitional world where drivers are still expected to be aware of what their “driverless” car is doing – and where the bulk of cars sharing the road are still driven by humans.

“I would suggest that as difficult as the transition to more automation has been in the structured and regulated environments we have investigated, it may be even more challenging in a public arena, in which drivers are usually not highly trained and may be fatigued, impaired, distracted, or not medically fit,” Hart said.