From Guest Blogger Jordan: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Would Be Reduced By 90 Percent If All Vehicles Were Driverless, Study Says

Safer roads and less congestion are the obvious advantages of driverless cars, but a new study says that the technology has the potential to bring substantial environmental benefits, as well. Eliminating the driver will definitely help improve traffic safety, given that human error is the leading cause of car accidents, but researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say that it will also help drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the new Berkeley study, the per-mile greenhouse gas emissions from an electric driverless car in 2030 deployed as a taxi will be anywhere between 63 and 82 percent lower than a privately owned plug-in hybrid built in 2030. Furthermore, researchers say that emissions from an autonomous taxi will be 90 percent lower than a 2014 conventional gasoline-powered car.

“When we first started looking at autonomous vehicles, we found that, of all the variables we could consider, the use of autonomous vehicles as part of a shared transit system seemed to be the biggest lever that pointed to lower energy use per mile,” said Jeffery Greenblatt, researcher at Berkeley Lab and co-author of the study.

Researchers attribute this huge decrease in emissions to the fact that autonomous taxis could be right-sized, which means that operators will be able to determine whether to dispatch a larger taxi or one with lower seating capacity depending on the number of passengers involved in any given trip. This will translate into less miles traveled and reduced energy consumption.

In addition to this, driverless cars are much more efficient than traditional vehicles, since they are able to avoid sharp acceleration and braking, and travel in platoons on highways thanks to their ability to drive more closely behind each other without risking a collision, which results in lower wind resistance and in turn lower energy consumption. “These are all incremental, but they do add up,” Greenblatt said. “However, we didn’t even include these effects in our baseline results, and we still get huge savings without them.”

On top of the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, replacing all privately-owned conventional vehicles with driverless taxis will result in a nearly 100 percent reduction in oil consumption, which will help the U.S. curb its dependence on foreign oil. What’s more, researchers claim that although the costs associated with production of a self-driving car are expected to be as high as $150,000, they will bring significant savings. They explain this claim by stating that autonomous taxis will be able to operate 24 hours a day, they will eliminate gasoline costs, along with the cost of a driver.

In conclusion, the findings from this study once again confirm that autonomous driving technology have not only the potential to transform transportation in a largely positive way, but also help protect the environment.