Having plied their trade in several US and Chinese cities for years, driverless taxis are on their way to London. As a cyclist, a Londoner and a journalist who has spent years covering AI's pratfalls, I am a tad nervous. Yet, given how often I have been struck by inattentive human drivers in London, part of me is cautiously optimistic. At the end of the day it boils down to this: will I be better off surrounded by tired, distracted and angry humans, or unpredictable and imperfect AI? The UK government has decided to allow firms like Uber to run pilots of self-driving "taxi- and bus-like" services in 2026.

Level 5 vehicles, which are self-driving in all road situations, do not yet exist. Moreover, it's not clear when that will change. Governments, consumers, and engineers alike want to know how close the automotive world is to producing a fully autonomous Level 5 vehicle. While some experts say such vehicles could hit the road in the next few years, they're a shrinking minority. Most forecasts say a truly self-driving car is at least a decade away -- and maybe much longer, because it requires disruptive technology that has yet to be invented.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a call for action to halve the annual rate of road deaths globally and ensure access to safe, affordable and sustainable transport for everyone by 2030. According to the newly launched initiative, faster progress on AI is vital to make this happen, especially in low and middle-income countries, where the most lives are lost on the roads each year. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 1.3 million people die annually as a result of road traffic crashes. Between 20 and 50 million more suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability. AI can help in different ways, including better collection and analysis of crash data, enhancing road infrastructure, increasing the efficiency of post-crash response, and inspiring innovation in the regulatory frameworks.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a call for action to halve the annual rate of road deaths globally and ensure access to safe, affordable and sustainable transport for everyone by 2030. According to the newly launched initiative, faster progress on AI is vital to make this happen, especially in low and middle-income countries, where the most lives are lost on the roads each year. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 1.3 million people die annually as a result of road traffic crashes. Between 20 and 50 million more suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability. AI can help in different ways, including better collection and analysis of crash data, enhancing road infrastructure, increasing the efficiency of post-crash response, and inspiring innovation in the regulatory frameworks.

Countries and investors need to step up the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) to keep roads safe for everyone, three UN Special Envoys said on Thursday, leading a new AI for Road Safety initiative. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a call for action to halve the annual rate of road deaths globally and ensure access to safe, affordable and sustainable transport for everyone by 2030. According to the newly launched initiative, faster progress on AI is vital to make this happen, especially in low and middle-income countries, where the most lives are lost on the roads each year. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 1.3 million people die annually as a result of road traffic crashes. Between 20 and 50 million more suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability.

Countries and investors need to step up the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) to keep roads safe for everyone, three UN Special Envoys said on Thursday, leading a new AI for Road Safety initiative. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a call for action to halve the annual rate of road deaths globally and ensure access to safe, affordable and sustainable transport for everyone by 2030. According to the newly launched initiative, faster progress on AI is vital to make this happen, especially in low and middle-income countries, where the most lives are lost on the roads each year. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 1.3 million people die annually as a result of road traffic crashes. Between 20 and 50 million more suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability.

There's little doubt that modern car safety features can be helpful, but Consumer Reports believes they could be crucial to saving lives. The publication just released a study estimating that US road deaths could be cut by 16,800 to 20,500, or roughly half of the 36,500 people lost in 2018, if certain safety features were standard on every car. Most of the lives saved, 11,800, would come fro ma combination of automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning, lane departure warning and pedestrian detection. Another 3,700 to 7,400 people could survive with drunk driving prevention tech, particularly the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety. Certain vehicle-to-vehicle connections could also save "at least" 1,300 lives by letting drivers known when it's safe to move through an intersection or make a left turn.

The timelines for autonomous vehicles keep shifting. Electric carmaker Tesla began selling a $3,000 "full self-driving" add-on to its Autopilot feature in 2016--everything you need to drive without driving!--but In 2012, Google's Sergey Brin said "ordinary people" would have access to self-driving cars by 2017; the company is still gearing up for a very limited driverless taxi service this year. Volvo quietly delayed a project that was supposed to put 100 Swedish families into autonomous vehicles by 2017. No one wants unready tech on public roads, but for anyone who has bought into the technology's promise to save lives, the delay is a bummer.

In the first decades of the 20th century, people around the world began succumbing to an entirely new cause of mortality. These new deaths, due to the dangers of the automobile, soon became accepted as a lamentable but normal part of modern life. A hundred years later, with 1.25 million people worldwide (about 30,000 in the U.S.) being killed every year in road crashes, there's now an effort to reject the perception that these deaths are normal or acceptable. As reported in a recent New York Times article, a growing number of safety advocates, government officials, and journalists are moving away from the phrase "car accident" on the grounds that it presumes that the drivers involved are blameless--a presumption that is correct only 6 percent of the time, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The vast majority of such incidents are caused by drivers who make mistakes, take risks, or drive while distracted or impaired.

The European Union is looking to connected vehicles and autonomous driving to reduce traffic fatalities, after a disappointing year for road safety. Last year, 26,000 died on European roads, up 1 percent on the previous year. "The latest figures are disappointing. For the second year in a row, we have not managed to reduce the number of victims on our roads," said European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc, presenting the EU's latest study of traffic accident statistics in Brussels on Thursday. Disappointing though the rise is, EU roads are still among the safest in the world, with traffic fatalities down 17 percent since 2010, after a reduction of 43 percent in the previous decade.