The Sobering Aspects of Self-Driving Cars Contending With Drunk Drivers

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

(Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/)

A sobering statistic: Drunk drivers account for nearly one-third of all traffic-related deaths in the United States (per stats by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).

The rule-of-thumb is that there’s an alcohol driving related death every hour, based on averaging the number of such deaths over the course of a year.

You might not realize that annually there are more than 1 million drivers arrested for driving under the influence (DUI), which is an equally scary statistic (one can only wonder how many of those might have gotten into a deathly incident were they not arrested!).

Of course, the one million drivers only represent those that were actually arrested and so presumably there would be many more that didn’t get caught.

Some surveys indicate that there are perhaps more than 111 million instances of DUI “episodes” per year by U.S. adult drivers (this is based on self-reported indications by drivers).