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Research & Discoveries (R&D): Two New Reports Demonstrate How AVs Will Create Jobs & Save Lives

Academics and experts around the world are studying how AVs can improve safety, enhance mobility, and create new economic opportunities, among other transformative benefits. AVIA’s Research & Discoveries (R&D) Series highlights these reports’ findings about how AVs can create a safer and more mobile world.

Need to Know (NTK):New reports from the Chamber of Progress reveal how AV development and deployment will save lives and create jobs. Based on their analysis, AVs could create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the next 15 years. By comparing and contrasting existing AV research with human-driven traffic fatality data, an additional report estimated that having more AVs on California roads could have saved as many as 1,300 lives over the past three years.

“ANALYSIS: AVS IN CALIFORNIA COULD HAVE SAVED UP TO 1,300 LIVES, PREVENTED UP TO 5,OOO MAJOR INJURIES OVER PAST THREE YEARS”
The first report from the Chamber of Progress evaluated traffic fatality rates in California and examined how AV deployments could help change the unsafe status quo on the state’s roads. 

By contrasting the safety record of AVs – via an analysis of California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) data on AV accidents and existing research – with statewide human-driven traffic fatalities, the report concluded that “research finds AVs safer than human drivers.”

The report also quantified how AVs could improve roadway safety in the state, utilizing existing research to project how many accidents would be avoided if AVs replaced human-driven vehicles on California roads. Based on three prospective AV adoption scenarios – conservative, moderate, and optimistic – the report projected how many fatalities, crashes with serious injuries, and crashes with minor injuries could have been avoided in the past three years. The numbers are staggering: If just 13% of automobiles were replaced by AVs between 2020 - 2022, California could have saved up to 1,300 lives and prevented up to 5,000 major injuries over the past three years.


“AV OPPORTUNITY: HOW MANY AND WHAT TYPES OF JOBS WILL BE CREATED BY AVS?”
The second report, commissioned by the Chamber of Progress and independently produced by Steer and Fourth Economy, accounted for the current scope of the AV industry and identified three future AV adoption scenarios – conservative, central, and optimistic. With this foundation, Steer analyzed how AV advancements would impact U.S. workers and the American economy. This analysis led them to produce the following projections:

In addition to estimating how many prospective good-paying jobs AVs will help create, Steer also presented key takeaways from its analysis that they did not quantify, including but not limited to:

CONCLUSION
Autonomous vehicles are operating in communities throughout the country every day. While AVIA members have driven nearly 70 million autonomous miles on U.S. public roads, AVs are not yet broadly deployed in the U.S.

What these reports reveal, however, is that broad deployment of AVs is not a prerequisite to autonomous technologies providing Americans with tangible benefits. As Steer’s report revealed – even in a conservative AV adoption scenario – AVs will create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs. More consequentially, as the Chamber of Progress safety report found, if just 13% of automobiles were autonomous in California between 2020 and 2022, nearly 1,300 lives would have been saved. 

As both reports point out, with the right policy framework in place, the advancement of AVs will be transformative for America.