Can Autonomous Vehicles Drive with Common Sense?

Could driverless cars save lives? Yes, but it may take a long road to get there. "Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are never drunk or tired or inattentive," says Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Julian De Freitas. "We expect that they will make roads truly much safer." In fact, De Freitas and colleagues recently argued in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that adopting driverless vehicles on a broad scale could improve global health on a level equivalent to the introduction of penicillin or vaccines.