Who benefits from driverless cars (not the poor)

Ashley Nunes, Driverless cars: researchers have made a wrong turn, Nature, 8 May 2019:

By merely rehashing the talking points of the self-driving industry, well-meaning academics draw attention away from the most important question that we should be asking about this technology: who stands to gain from its life-saving potential? Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues found that although road fatalities in the United States fell between 1995 and 2010, this benefit was not spread evenly across the socio-economic spectrum (S. Harper et al. Am. J. Epidemiol. 182, 606–614; 2015). If you live in the United States and have at least a university degree, your odds of dying on the nation’s roads have declined. But if you haven’t graduated from university, those odds have risen. In 1995, the mortality rates related to motor-vehicle accidents involving people at the bottom of the education spectrum were 2.4 times higher than those involving people at the top. By 2010, they were about 4.3 times higher.

One reason for this might be that people with less money tend to own older vehicles that lack advanced safety features, such as rear-facing cameras, blind-spot detectors and adaptive cruise control. To put it more simply: if there is a group in the United States that stands to benefit most from the life-saving potential of self-driving technology, it’s those who live in the greatest poverty, but only if they can afford the technology. Driverless-car technology might have the potential to improve public health and save lives, but if those who most need it don’t have access, whose lives would we actually be saving?