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Building autonomous vehicles that don't cause accidents is a difficult but crucial challenge.

"It's not enough to be as safe as the human driver. We need to be crashless," said John Maddox, an associate administrator at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and keynote speaker at Wednesday's Driverless Car Summit in Detroit.

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He added that approximately 33,000 people die each year in the United States because of car crashes and that human error accounted for 93% of those crashes.

Researchers and developers of autonomous cars must put safety atop the list of priorities, since it's what consumers will care most about.

"Convenience and fuel economy are real benefits, but people won't drive an automated vehicle if it's not safe," Maddox claimed.

The summit, hosted by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, hinted at driverless cars by 2022. Maddox doesn't know if that goal can be reached in 10 years. "I don't have an answer," he said, "but any answer would be a guess."


_{Source: Detroit News}