How Tesla Will Solve Traffic Jams!

[00:00:00]So Tesla recently shared the story of a 93-year-old woman who had stopped driving very much because she no longer felt safe behind the wheel. With Tesla's full self-driving, however, she's driving herself to appointments again, running errands, and even taking road trips to visit family. That's already an incredible story. But what if that's only half of the story? It turns out that a Tesla using full self-driving doesn't just make its own driver safer.

[00:00:23]It could actually make everyone else on the road safer, eliminate many traffic jams, and make driving better and more efficient for everyone. As I'm sure you know, if you've spent any time in construction zones, we spend billions of dollars building new lanes, wider highways, and bigger interchanges because we assume that traffic is an infrastructure problem. But what if it isn't? What if the real solution isn't more concrete, but more autonomous vehicles? And that leads to a fascinating question. How many Teslas would it take to fix traffic? The answer is likely a lot different than you think. Let's take a look. Before we start, a quick shout out to my channel sponsor, Joah. They make amazing accessories for your Tesla and other EVs and also have great warranties and customer service, too. In fact, I use their accessories daily. Be sure to check the link in the description to get 5% off a fan cooled phone charger, a portable tire inflator, a foldout lap table, and a lot of other items. Oh, and they make perfect gifts for you and your EV loving friends, too. So, be sure to check out Joah. And now, let's get back to it.

[00:01:23]Hey y'all, it's Dr. Knowit All. So, I'm going to start and end. I'm going to kind of bookend this video with this particular post with this particular post from Tesla about a 93-year-old woman who was unable to drive anymore.

[00:01:34]And that's not unreasonable, by the way.

[00:01:35]I'm in my early 60s and already noticing the fact that I don't drive as well as I used to, but how Tesla's full self-driving has given her the freedom to travel again. And that is a really big deal and something that I've talked about previously on this channel. But what I haven't talked about is how Tesla is also going to help fix traffic around the car. Not just for you in the Tesla vehicle yourself, but everybody around you. And from experiments, it's going to take surprisingly few autonomous vehicles like Teslas to fix traffic in general. So anyway, let's look at this video first and then we'll move on and we'll talk about traffic jams and we'll talk about efficiency and we'll talk about autonomous vehicles. So that's what we have in store. But first, this nice heartwarming story here. I can't tell you what it means to a son to see his mother's world now [music] expanding when before, much like other older people, it was shrinking and becoming smaller. I see her driving across [music] San Diego County to visit her daughters, to visit her [music] grandkids, and it makes me so happy to know that she has this freedom now.

[00:02:36]>> I'd just like [music] to say I've been driving for 75 years. I find that [music] I'm able to just do it. I don't have to wait for someone and it's been a wonderful experience.

[00:02:49]>> So, that's a really wonderful thing. And I have a feeling if you're over a certain age, you probably can relate to this. And I have to say one of the reasons why I'm long-term the most excited to own a Tesla is because I'm quite confident that within a couple of years, the car is going to be able to drive me entirely on its own. I won't even have to officially supervise it anymore. Could happen as soon as 6 or 8 months. might take a couple of years due to chasing those nines and regulations and stuff, but it is a really big deal for those of us who are getting older and might not be as good at drivers as we used to be. But the bigger picture here, and this is borne out by experiments over the last 20 years or so, is that autonomous vehicles can actually help traffic in general, not only make traffic safer, but also make it flow better and be more efficient and save gas or battery power or however you're powering your car.

[00:03:32]So with that said, let's take a look at this original experiment from 2008 from the University of Nagoya and Nagoya, Japan. And yes, this is very, very low resolution footage, but this is from 2008. So this is the very dawn of shared videos. So anyway, you'll just have to put up with the fact that it's not the most high resolution video in the world, but you get the point. For the first time, Japanese researchers have conducted a real life experiment that shows how some traffic jams appear for no apparent reason. They placed 22 vehicles on a single track as the drivers to cruise around at a constant speed of 30 km an hour. At first, traffic moved smoothly, but soon the distance between cars started to vary and vehicles clumped together at one point on the track. The jam spread backwards around the track like a shock wave at a rate of about 20 km an hour.

[00:04:18]Real life jams move backwards at about the same speed.

[00:04:21]>> So, let me turn off the sound and you can actually watch this. Again, it's very very low resolution, but in particular, you can see this red car and this sort of blue car. And you can see how what happens is the cars start to jam up against each other. And then that shock wave, the the traffic jam, shock wave propagates backwards around this circle at about 20 km/h, which apparently through observation is the same speed that it does so in real traffic jams, you know, out in the real world. So again, you can see they're relatively well spaced and they're all supposed to be driving the same speed.

[00:04:49]But what happens is as this car slows down a little bit, this car slows down a little bit, you can see that this car slows this car, this car slows this car.

[00:04:57]So what happens, as I'm sure you can relate to, is if you're in a situation like that, you're driving, you're relatively close behind another vehicle in front of you, and as the person breaks or something, you tap the brakes a little bit harder than they do, and the person behind you taps the brakes a little bit harder than you do, and the person behind them taps a little harder than that. Right? So what happens is each person is overreacting by a small amount. And that small amount with enough traffic, and in this case it was 22 vehicles around this circle. If they only had like 18 or 20 vehicles, then the traffic jams wouldn't appear. But if it was 22 or more, then the traffic jams would inevitably appear and you would see them propagating backwards. So given a certain amount of traffic, traffic jams are basically inevitable. If you have enough traffic density, the way that people react to traffic actually causes traffic jams. And of course, there are multiple consequences of this.

[00:05:43]Number one, of course, is it can be very unsafe because if somebody's breaking in front of you and you don't notice, you can get into an accident. But that's kind of the worst case scenario. What happens more normally is, of course, that the traffic jam propagates and you sit in traffic for a period of time for 5 minutes or 10 minutes for no apparent reason whatsoever. And there really wasn't a reason for it. You just sit in traffic. So, you're late to work or you're late to your appointment or whatever. But then on top of that, you've also used your brakes, which means you're using your brakes more than you would otherwise. And of course, the consequent use of gas. there's more gas usage because of the fact that you're having to break and accelerate and break and accelerate. And of course, this was prior to electric vehicles, but with electric vehicles, you would be using more battery charge instead. But generally speaking, you're wasting time.

[00:06:23]You're not getting traffic through as efficiently as possible, and you're using your brakes and of course more energy to drive yourself. So all of those things are related to human reaction time and our slight overreaction to any given circumstance.

[00:06:34]And of course, there was a scientific paper published along with this. I will leave links to all of this stuff in the description so you can check this all out at your leisure. But you can see the title of the associated paper was traffic jams without bottlenecks. In other words, without an inciting incident like an accident or something like that, experimental evidence for the physical mechanism of the formation of a jam. So this is a landmark experiment in a landmark paper very famous in the annals of driving and traffic flow.

[00:06:59]But then if we jump forward about a decade to May of 2017, you can see this follow-up paper called dissipation of stopand go waves via control of autonomous vehicles field experiments.

[00:07:09]And this paper is the one that relates directly to Tesla. Although Teslas were not involved in this at all. This is very primitive days for autonomous vehicles. This was a custom-designed vehicle. It didn't really drive itself in any sophisticated kind of way. But what the algorithm did was it smoothed out the human overreaction that leads to bottlenecks. And we can see from the associated video exactly how this happens and it's very very cool. So anyway, they set up a similar kind of experiment. They're going the opposite direction. But anyway, the autonomous vehicle here is the one that's in a kind of a silver color and the experiment starts with a human driver. So you can see that you've got these waves going on. That's what this stuff is. This is showing the waves of the traffic and that's c that's the traffic jam everything that's going on here. Then they turn on autonomy at 6.5 meters per second. You can see that it begins to smooth things out and then they actually improves over time. If they go to seven meters per second, which is close to which is closer to regular traffic flow, you can see that it smooths it out even more. It begins to get even even better.

[00:08:08]Then they move on to 7.5 m/s and you can actually see that it smooths it out extremely extremely well and that makes it that's actually the best result that they get. And then they speed it up beyond basic traffic flow. So it's going faster than more of tra than you know common traffic. And you can see that the waves begin to develop again. And if I kind of take myself out of the way here, you can see that the waves get worse at, you know, at at eight meters per second.

[00:08:34]And then it gets a little bit better at 7.5. And then if you disable autonomy, it goes back to the regular waves that get formed through all of this. So, not only is this a wonderful experiment, it's also a really, really well-designed video. I really appreciate this. You can see here that you've got the experiment start. You've got the human being driving at the beginning where the waves start to form. You can also see that there is a velocity standard deviation which means how you know how much are you moving back and forth in terms of away from your target velocity which by the way was 7.5 m/s which I think is about 25 km/h something like that. But anyway, that was the target velocity for all the human drivers here. And if we count, I believe this is the same 22 vehicles as there were in the Japanese experiment. But again, what they've done is they've included this silver vehicle which has the autonomous stuff in it.

[00:09:21]And again, the human driver at the beginning, you can see the waves start to form as soon as you engage the autonomy with a speed of 6.5 m/s, which is slower than the general traffic flow, but still it almost immediately gets rid of those traffic waves and smooths out traffic. And as you increase it to exactly what the general traffic flow is, you can see that the standard deviation goes down to 0.64. Fuel consumption drops from 24.6 6 L per 100 kilm all the way down to 14.1. Braking is reduced from 1.66 events per vehicle all the way down to 0.12. And the throughput, which is how much traffic is flowing through, goes from 189 vehicles per hour all the way up to 285 vehicles per hour. So, here's the amazing part.

[00:10:02]It only took one out of 22 vehicles or 4.5% of the vehicles on the quote road.

[00:10:08]I know it's just a circle and everything, but it only took 4.5% of the vehicles being autonomous to basically get rid of all the traffic jam waves, smooth out traffic, reduce the likelihood of an emergency type of event like an accident or something like that.

[00:10:22]Improve fuel economy, reduce braking, improve throughput, all of that kind of stuff. So, just one out of 22 vehicles being autonomous has a huge positive effect on traffic.

[00:10:34]And then following up on this, in 2022, there was the circles experiment that happened outside of Nashville. We actually drove by there recently on our way up to Michigan for the Michigan event. So, I'm actually familiar with this little interchange on I24. But anyway, what they did was they took an automated vehicle and put it in actual traffic flow and they researched what would happen with that. And you can see that vehicle right here. and that vehicle actually smoothed out the traffic behind it in a real environment in an actual traffic environment as opposed to just an experimental circumstance. So what this actually proved was that autonomous vehicles in a real world situation just a small percentage of autonomous vehicles would smooth out traffic in a real world situation. In other words, it vetted this experiment in the real world and showed that basically the same percent of vehicles being autonomous as was done in this experiment. Also created a situation where in the real world it smoothed out traffic, improved fuel economy, reduced braking events, obviously reduced the number of emergency type of stops, potential accidents, all of that kind of stuff. So there is a huge positive effect from just having a very few autonomous vehicles on the road.

[00:11:43]All right. So these experiments happened between 2008 and 2022. None of them involved Tesla with full self-driving.

[00:11:49]They weren't using end-to-end neural networks. They were using much much simpler automated vehicles. They weren't predicting traffic. They weren't planning routes. They simply avoided overreact. That was the entire purpose of the autonomous vehicle was not to overreact, to just react the appropriate amount. And you can see that just about 5% of vehicles on the road having this primitive autonomous software inside it had huge downstream effects for all of the vehicles around that autonomous vehicle. In other words, it made the road safer and more efficient. Not just for the autonomous vehicle itself, but for everybody around that vehicle. And that is huge. But with Tesla's full self-driving, and you could also argue with Whimo and other autonomous vehicles themselves, we're running a much broader experiment. And honestly, if Tesla has some data about this, this would be really cool if they would publish it.

[00:12:33]About traffic behind their autonomous vehicles, if they have information about that, about reduced braking, if you're in heavy traffic, and the Tesla with full self-driving engaged has to slow down, if they have evidence that there are fewer braking events behind them, there are fewer severe braking events behind them. I don't know if they collect that kind of data, but it would be very, very cool if they did. But anyway, with modern autonomous driving, like Tesla's full self-driving, the cars can see further than these autonomous vehicles did. They can predict much farther away. They can react more smoothly than these autonomous vehicles were able to. And of course, with recent builds like 14.3, they can even anticipate traffic and actually pre-break, pre-adjust prior to any of these braking events even happening. So that means that every Tesla robo taxi, every Tesla that has full self-driving engaged has the potential to act like a shock absorber in traffic. It's able to smooth out all of the breaking events and allow the traffic behind it to not have to overreact and to thereby create these traffic congestion shock waves that travel back through the traffic and cause these traffic jams. So, a Tesla or a robo taxi with full self-driving engaged instead of amplifying disturbances actually absorbs those disturbances. And by the way, as a little public service announcement, I would say that if you are in heavy traffic or a traffic jam and you have access to Tesla's full self-driving, you should engage it because the experimental evidence indicates that you will help to smooth out traffic in general. In other words, you will help to make the traffic better. So, you should definitely engage full self-driving when there is heavy traffic. In those circumstances, it should help out a lot.

[00:14:03]All right, so that's the evidence we have so far. Now, let's have a little bit of fun and speculate. What happens if 5% of the vehicles on the road are Teslas running full self-driving or a vehicle like a Whimo or something like that that is also running autonomously and helping to smooth out traffic? What happens at 10%, at 20%, at 30%, at 50%.

[00:14:21]What is the critical number of Teslas with full self-driving engaged that can actually absorb enough traffic to reduce traffic jams or even eliminate them under some circumstances? The fascinating thing is the evidence actually shows it would not take that many Tesla vehicles with full self-driving engaged to smooth out traffic flow and make traffic flow safer for everyone. Whether that's as little as 5% or whether it needs to be more like 10 or 20% probably depends on the other drivers around and also the amount of congestion. Of course, 22 vehicles in the original experiment circle is a lot of traffic, but not as jammed as it could be. And on many highways, the traffic is much much more jammed than that 22 vehicles. So traffic jams under those circumstances become almost inevitable. But from the evidence that we've seen, even under really heavy congestion, under really heavy traffic circumstances, a relatively small number of Teslas with full self-driving engaged will help to smooth out that traffic and reduce the chance of a natural traffic jam forming. My guess would be it would be somewhere between 10 and 20%. So, in other words, if there was one out of 10 vehicles or one out of five vehicles being Teslas with full self-driving engaged, even under very heavy traffic congestion, we would likely get rid of those intermittent traffic jams that form for no reason whatsoever. And to be quite honest, in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, the number of Teslas on the road might actually be approaching a couple of percent during traffic jams. So, we actually could in those areas be approaching a number where Teslas with full self-driving engaged could actually smooth out traffic and help to make traffic better for everyone involved. Even the many people who do not currently own a Tesla and are not using a full self-driving type of solution. So, of course, we're going to have to wait on real world results. But the research indicates just a few% of vehicles driving with autonomous software like Tesla's full self-driving could really, really help traffic.

[00:16:06]And the really interesting issue here is that that means that we might not need to install extra lanes. We might not need to widen highways. We might not need to spend billions and billions of dollars to make the infrastructure bigger and better. Instead, if the government and companies just encourage really good autonomous driving like Tesla's full self-driving, road capacity could increase simply because traffic becomes more stable, more smoothed out.

[00:16:29]There are fewer incidents and more throughput during congested traffic times. So, how many Teslas would it take on the road to create fewer phantom traffic jams, smoother commutes, fewer rear-end collisions, lower fuel consumption, lower emissions, less stress, and more predictable travel times, and do all this without spending billions of dollars on road infrastructure? It might not take all that many.

[00:16:52]So, let's get back to the 93-year-old woman's experience that we began this video with. Most people, including me, see full self-driving as a technology that helps the person inside of the car.

[00:17:02]But these experiments suggest something much, much bigger. Every smoothly driven Tesla improves conditions for everybody around it. And the benefits to all traffic, not just the Teslas, but everybody around that are nonlinear.

[00:17:14]Just a few autonomous vehicles like Teslas can smooth traffic out significantly more than the numbers would suggest. So, in the end, better traffic might not arrive when every vehicle is autonomous. It might begin the moment there are just enough Teslas on the road to change the physics of traffic itself. And again, I will end this with what I consider to be a public service announcement. If you want a Tesla vehicle with full self-driving or honestly even just traffic aware cruise control, please engage it when there is congestion around you. You are actually helping out traffic around you by having the vehicle drive itself rather than you do that. And that is especially true if you're an older driver or somebody who is distracted or otherwise someone who is driving in a manner that might increase the amount of traffic congestion by overreacting, breaking too hard, all of that kind of stuff. If you just engage full self-driving, you're going to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. And that's something that everyone who is sat in a traffic jam, which is most of us, will very much appreciate. Thank you. All righty, folks. That's what I've got for you today. Let me know in the comments what you think about all of this. Do you generally engage full self-driving when there is a lot of traffic around you or do you take it out of full self-driving?

[00:18:17]Do you feel more confident driving yourself? I would suggest if the latter is the case that you try full self-driving in these circumstances. You might find that it drives a little bit better than you. It's a little bit smoother and it definitely reduces your stress. You don't have to concentrate so much, which is really, really nice. So, that's good for you in the car, but remember, it's also good for everybody around you, which is wonderful. Anyway, let me know what you think about all of this. And while you're down there, if you don't mind liking the video, it really helps with YouTube's algorithm.

[00:18:42]And if you want to help the channel out the most in 2026 and help us get to 100,000 subscribers, we are less than 3,000 away at this point. Woohoo. Thank you all so much for that. Anyway, please check to make sure you're subscribed. If you're not, definitely hit that subscription button, hit the bell notification icon, and I will see you in the next [music] video. Bye-bye.

[00:19:07]>> [music]