Driverless Cars Could Force Other Road Users To Drive More Efficiently

The idea that autonomous cars, even in small numbers, can increase fuel efficiency, travel times and safety for all cars on the road will be put to the test on routes around Nashville, Tennessee, later this year. Benedetto Piccoli at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and his colleagues previously used a computer model of a simple circular road with just one lane in each direction, and found that autonomous cars could decrease overall fuel consumption of all traffic by 40 percent, even once adoption of these vehicles had only reached 5 per cent.

The best-case scenarios from these new models “rarely happen” in the real world, he says, but his team still hopes to reduce fuel consumption of all vehicles on the road during the trial — not just the driverless cars — by as much as 10 percent. “If you take just the overall cost of the traffic system in any country, and you reduce that by even 5 percent we are talking about billions of dollars,” he says. The researchers have shared their findings in a paper via arXiv.org.