[ocdtrekkie]

The suggestion I've seen repeatedly is that self-driving cars can travel faster with smaller gaps between vehicles due to strong coordination between them and near-instant response time in processing compared to a human. The article also suggests safety equipment in the vehicle would potentially be lessened as well. (Google's little koala cars would crush like tin cans, for example.)

Of course, when something goes wrong with that, yes, the accident would be more severe, because the velocity is higher and the likelihood of multi-car collision would also go up.

Of course, the effect may be akin to an airplane crash: When one crashes, the survival chances are lower, and more people are killed, than say, in a car crash. However, the frequency of the incident is drastically less, and hence airplanes are generally understood to be safer, statistically.

[protomyth]

I would hope that we spend some years not packing the cars together before we have a decent set of data on the performance under nation-wide, real world conditions.

If we expect to get to that level, then the crash investigators better be closer to airplane crash level care then our current level of investigation.

[saint_fiasco]

Packing cars together and synchronizing them is probably the safer way. Less chance that a car, person or animal will get between two cars if the space between them is less.

How many pedestrians are killed by jumping between two train wagons?

[protomyth]

I would rather we take small step, and frankly deer have no problem jumping into groups of cars or even between semis and their trailers. They are not a situationally aware animal.

> How many pedestrians are killed by jumping between two train wagons?

How many tires blow out per year, or cars get slippery?

[saint_fiasco]

Fewer tires than they would if a computer checked their air pressure diligently.

Taking small steps is fine, but the smallness should be in the location, not the density. Just a small neighborhood with only self driving cars, instead of a large neighborhood with a small proportion of self driving cars.

And of course, a deer-free neighborhood will be best to start with.