Self-driving cars are safer than those driven by humans except at dusk, dawn or when the vehicle is turning, according to a new study.
Autonomous vehicles are involved in fewer accidents than human-driven cars, researchers at University of Central Florida I found.
However, although research has generally shown autonomous cars to be safer, found that they seem more prone to accidents in specific situations.
During low-light conditions at dawn or dusk, they were five times more likely to have an accident than a human-driven car.
When negotiating curves, self-driving cars were almost twice as likely to have an accident.
There have been a number of high-profile accidents with self-driving cars, and last week a car in autonomous mode collided with a police car in California as officers responded to a deadly collision.
Self-driving cars could be on UK roads by 2026after a new law was passed in May.
The law aims to create jobs and also improve road safety by “reducing human error, which contributes to 88% of road collisions”, according to the Department of Transport.
Last year, a UK study by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers suggested that seven in ten people would feel uncomfortable traveling in an autonomous vehicle without human control.
Almost a third (29%) of people were concerned about how their car would handle accidents.
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The researchers, Mohamed Abdel-Aty and Shengxuan Ding, compared crash data collected from 2,100 autonomous vehicles and 35,133 human-driven vehicles between 2016 and 2022.
They found that autonomous vehicles were less likely to be involved in accidents when performing routine driving tasks such as maintaining lane position and adjusting to the flow of traffic.
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Autonomous vehicles have also been shown to be safer when struck from behind or from the side.
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