Left turns are becoming a thing of the past. This article features federal data that shows left turns cause nearly 10 times as many car crashes as right turns. Companies such as UPS and the navigational app Waze are trying to avoid the problem altogether by following routes that take left turns as sparingly as possible, such as at sparsely congested intersections. For autonomous cars, the difficulties of left turns largely persist due to issues in navigating around non-autonomous cars. Such difficulties may, quite literally, drive autonomous cars in the right direction.
But if this aversion to the left and a proclivity for the right persists, how are car brands of the future to respond? As autonomous cars start to replace non-autonomous ones, will companies showcase safety in their model names, in order to prompt the “right” course of action?