There has always been a talk about how much safe the self driving cars actually are. We have seen many individuals and experts questioning the safety regarding a car that is actually driven by automated software instead of humans. A recent study suggests that it is probably safe to have software driving your car instead of a driver doing so.

The study reveals that any automated car suffers from fewer accidents when it is being driven by an actual driver. The study was released on Friday by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

The study included approximately 50 Google’s Self driving cars and the reports include a few crashes here and there. In most of the cases, the crashes have been minor ones where no fatal accident took place. The 50 self driving cars had covered roughly 1.3 million miles around the state of Texas and California in its automated self driving mode. Google’s report suggests that there have been around about 17 crashes in the whole thing and none of them have been owing to any fault of the self driving cars.

The police reported that it the severity of the accidents is taken into consideration, the average rate is about 4.2 crashes per million miles driven by drivers compared to 3.2 crashes per million miles for any self driving car. The crash rates can be different in case of drivers as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration states that approximately 24% of crashes related to injuries are not even reported.

This study will be a major boost for all the car makers currently working on self driving cars and automated systems. But the question still remains that can the self driving cars bring in the life saving maneuvers that can be thought of instantly by the drivers.