Prepping Self-Driving Cars for the World's Most Chaotic Cities

They’re honing their skills amidst humans in Europe, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. They’re preparing for the day they can purify our chaotic streets with their robotic perfection.

Learning how to drive in places like unruly Boston, a land of creative left turns and seemingly optional yields, comes with its challenges. But the aggressive driving and the complexity of the city’s twisting streets pale in comparison to the developing world. Even Patriots fans look like goody two-shoes compared to drivers who have little to zero respect for lanes, traffic signals, warning signs, and speed limits.

On wide roads without lanes and huge, anarchic intersections all over the world, human interaction dictates traffic flows, with each driver adjusting to others’ maneuvers on the spot, regardless of what the rule book says.

These informal systems work for the most part, but they come at a high cost. Of the 50 countries with the deadliest roads, 44 are in Africa or the Middle East, according to 2013 figures from the World Health Organization (the most recent data available). Together these nations accounted for nearly 250,000 deaths in 2013—a fifth of the world’s total.

Yet the factors that make these places the most likely to benefit from autonomous cars also make them the least likely to get the technology anytime soon.

"Many of the things that we're doing in self-driving at the moment probably wouldn't work if we were trying to do it in a third-world country," says Ram Vasudevan, codirector of the University of Michigan's Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles.