How safe are self-driving cars? ComfortDelGro incident at Punggol raises questions

SINGAPORE: During a test drive on Saturday afternoon (Jan 17), one of ComfortDelGro’s self-driving vehicles hit a road divider. Fortunately, no passengers were in the car, and no one was injured in the mishap.

The company told CNA that in the course of routine mapping and familiarisation, the vehicle “detected a small object on the road and responded accordingly.”

There was a safety operator who manually took over the steering of the vehicle but “unfortunately, the vehicle collided with the road divider during the manual takeover.”

Photos of the incident have since been shared on social media.

ComfortDelGro also said that its self-driving vehicles are taking a safety timeout, as the company, together with the authorities, reviews the mishap.

With advancements in technology, one can expect autonomous vehicles to become more and more a part of everyday life, and trials in Singapore have been going on for several years now.

Read related: Self-driving buses trial run to be launched at Marina Bay and One-North

How safe are self-driving vehicles?

However, the incident in Punggol last weekend seems to have given rise to concerns, with commenters online wondering how safe they really are.

It’s not as though the technology isn’t already in use in other parts of the world. China’s “robotaxis” from companies such as Baidu’s Apollo Go are operational in a number of Chinese cities and have ferried millions to their destinations. The country also has numerous driverless delivery vans. Moreover, Chinese companies are conducting testing for autonomous vehicles in other countries, including Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, France, and South Korea.

In Europe, autonomous mini-buses and shuttles are no longer uncommon in many cities across the continent, and “robotaxi” trials are also underway. In the United Kingdom, Waymo is scheduled to launch a driverless taxi service this summer.

However, just because the technology is spreading quickly does not mean it is working perfectly, as the incident in Punggol shows.

For example, in 2018, an Uber self-driving test vehicle in the United States that had a human safety driver on board still hit and killed a pedestrian.

And yes, while that was many years ago, just last weekend in San Francisco, a car door was struck by a Zoox autonomous robotaxi, which injured the vehicle’s owner. Zoox claimed that it was the owner’s fault because he suddenly opened his car door. However, many have voiced concerns about how driverless vehicles react to sudden and unexpected occurrences. /TISG

Read also: Self-driving cars won’t impact taxi and private-hailing drivers’ jobs soon, authorities to provide training support for the transition