Why We’re Developing Self-Driving Cars—and Often Forget the Reasons

The accelerating rollout of commercial driverless robotaxis—which already includes at least two robotaxi fleets in 15 metropolitan areas in the U.S. and is also being prepared in Europe and Asia—leads us to focus primarily on the technology’s shortcomings and occasional failures.

In doing so, we tend to forget why this technology is being developed. It is intended to reduce the number of traffic accidents—and thus also the number of traffic fatalities and injuries. While companies repeatedly publish statistics on the safety of their own vehicles, no one pays attention to them or takes them seriously. Yet we should take a closer look. Waymo recently made headlines with a report comparing figures from July 2024 to June 2026 with those of human drivers, concluding that its own vehicles were involved in 841 fewer accidents resulting in injuries than human drivers. But numbers are abstract; we need to get more specific.

And that is exactly what VINCI Autoroutes, a French company that builds, maintains, and operates highways, demonstrated in July 2025 with a safety initiative titled “Quand allez-vous percuter ?” (“When are you going to crash?”). The company lined up dozens of safety vehicles in a highway parking lot just before a toll plaza, all of which had several things in common: bright colors, flashing lights, warning signs, and, most notably, a completely destroyed rear section. Despite all these measures, human drivers overlook these warnings and the vehicles themselves, and crash into them. This is dangerous not only for those at fault but also for the occupants of the vehicles, as well as for the maintenance vehicles and other road users. And despite all these warnings, on average, one car crashes into one of these safety vehicles every week on French highways. As explained in the video, 31 of these vehicles were struck between January 1, 2025, and July 2025, and there were also four fatalities.

The following video shows 27 destroyed security vehicles.

France isn’t the only country where this happens with remarkable regularity. Highway operators in Germany, where speed limits are even higher, know this all too well. Years ago, the University of Braunschweig tested a driverless prototype of a safety vehicle that drove ahead of the actual maintenance vehicle.

This article was also published in German.