Terrible drivers could teach autonomous cars how to avoid crashes

Guerilla / Alamy Stock Photo

By Richard Kemeny

Backseat driving can irritate even the most stoic of human drivers, but for autonomous vehicles those nagging comments could lead to the perfect road technique.

The software that powers autonomous vehicles is often trained on hours of footage of people driving. This footage normally only contains human drivers at their best, but this could mean that if an autonomous vehicle is faced with a pileup ahead, for example, it will only know how to stick in lane rather than swerving out …