Dr. Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon, recently posted an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled “The Data on Self-Driving Cars Is Clear. We Have to Change Course.”
His first paragraph is reproduced below.
I recently got called to see a teenager ejected in a rollover car crash. The trauma team rushed him into surgery to stop major abdominal bleeding, but we all knew. When that much energy enters a skull, no operation can turn it back. He was declared brain dead. His death was a reminder of the staggering amount of suffering and loss of human life we accept from car accidents every single day.
From there, the doctor cites information published by Waymo, the autonomous driving company, to support his proposal that it is time to plan for and implement the transition to human driverless transportation. He points out that Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million driverless miles in four American cities through June 2025. The Waymo statistics can be accessed here.
100 million driverless miles!
91% fewer serious injuries!
79% fewer airbag deployments.
92% fewer pedestrian crashes with injuries.
Etc., Etc.
Dr. Slotkin’s admonition is summarized in his last paragraph, reproduced below.
There’s a future in which manual driving becomes uncommon, perhaps even quaint, the way riding horses is today. It’s a future where we no longer accept thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of broken spines as the price of mobility. It’s time to stop treating this like a tech moonshot and start treating it like a public health intervention.
Thanks for reading.
