Autonomous Vehicles Big data is also being used to make autonomous cars safer, reducing the already small amount of crashes they have been part of..Tesla, for example, uses machine learning, another facet of big data, to create a sense-plan-act program, which uses high volumes of data to predict outcomes for an action the autopilot takes in any given scenario..While this could, in theory, lead to the infamous trolley problem of one vs..many, it is an attempt to allow a computer to make what it, based on data, believes is the smartest, safest decision..Safety With an estimated 10 million self-driving cars on the road by 2020, safety is a big concern..With about 81 percent of car crashes are the result of human error, and the person behind the wheel of an autonomous car when it crashes is still to blame, safety is the top concern..That means collecting as much data as possible..Google’s Waymo, for example, has driven a staggering 10 million miles in nine years of testing..They have simulated nearly 7 billion miles of travel..The Waymo vehicles use sensors to detect people, bicyclists, other vehicles, and even road work more than three football fields away in full 360 degrees..All this data is fed into machine learning..It can even detect a cyclist signaling with their arm which way they intend to turn, and the AI acts accordingly.. More details