Driverless cars could force other road users to drive more efficiently

Cars controlled by AI drive smoothly and more efficiently, and a computer model suggests the effect spreads to nearby drivers too

By Matthew Sparkes

Autonomous cars are predicted to improve fuel efficiency for everyone on the road – an idea that will be put to the test on routes around Nashville, Tennessee, later this year.

Benedetto Piccoli at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and his colleagues previously used a computer model of a simple circular road with just one lane in each direction, and found that autonomous cars could decrease overall fuel consumption of all traffic by 40 per cent, even once adoption of these vehicles had only …