By reducing human fluctuations and predicting nearby events, an automated vehicle can often surpass the efficiency of a similar manually-driven vehicle.

The equation changes when we zoom out though.

Adding a few automated vehicles on the road changes the game. Computers don’t drive like we do (at least for now).

For example, they stay at set distances from nearby vehicles. This makes sense theoretically, but it also messes up the flow of traffic. Rather than fluidly shrinking and widening follow distances during heavy highway traffic, the current generation of automated vehicles stick with a specific distance, regardless what happens around them.

This makes it difficult for nearby human drivers to predict how traffic will move, which actually tends to decrease the efficiency of the manual vehicles nearby the automated vehicle.

So in isolation, the automated vehicle is clearly more efficient. But the situation is messier when we think about traffic as a whole.

This specific problem will likely be resolved as more automated vehicles hit the roads and software improves, but it highlights an interesting point – we can’t determine how effective a given technology is without first understanding how it impacts the world around it.

-Brandon