Study finds driverless cars crash less often than human drivers but flags data shortfalls (TNND) — A new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found driverless cars might be safer than having humans at the wheel, but the report flagged a lack of data to adequately monitor autonomous vehicle safety moving forward. The IIHS team looked at crash data for driverless vehicles roaming the streets in a handful of American cities, including San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin. IIHS determined that self-driving cars were involved in 68% fewer crashes than human-driven cars on a per-mile basis. But there was a lot of clutter in the data to cut through to come up with a realistic comparison, said lead author Eric Teoh. Both the federal government and California collect data on self-driving car collisions, but the companies operating the driverless cars are required to report everything that results in any damage. And the threshold is very low. Teoh said the driverless car companies have to report things that aren't even crashes to most of us, like turning left into a parking lot and scraping the vehicle’s undercarriage. Meanwhile, human drivers are generally only required to report crashes that cause an injury or result in more than $1,000 in property damage to the police, according to IIHS. A person isn’t going to call the police over a scratched bumper, Teoh said. To come up with a meaningful comparison, Teoh and his fellow IIHS researchers had to boil down the data on self-driving cars to just those incidents that would’ve met the police-reporting threshold for human drivers. Researchers were also limited by a lack of available information on how many miles driverless cars traveled over their study period. The driverless car companies aren’t obligated to report the miles they log,