A self-driving car 'never would've accelerated,' experts say of New Orleans attack

A New Year's Day truck attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans killed 14 people and injured 35 others, the FBI said Thursday.

The suspect -- 42-year-old Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who also died in the attack -- was "hell-bent" on killing as many people as possible, driving a pickup truck onto the sidewalk around a parked police car serving as a barricade to plow into pedestrians, officials said.

Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI, called the attack a premeditated “act of terrorism.”

The incident marks the latest in a series of vehicle-ramming attacks in recent years, coming just days after a car killed five and injured 200 at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany.

The vehicle-ramming attacks brought renewed focus to some of the security challenges they pose, considering the wide availability of cars, the challenge of protecting crowds with barricades and the difficulty of determining an assailant’s plans ahead of time.

Some experts who spoke to ABC News, however, said a new technology could in theory prevent car-ramming attacks: self-driving cars.

Computer systems directing a car’s movements could stop it from charging toward crowded areas or striking pedestrians, the experts said. But they noted that self-driving vehicles pose terror risks of their own as potential unmanned bomb-carrying devices or cybersecurity targets.

Self-driving cars face technical hurdles and remain far from wide adoption, making them an uncertain fix, experts added.

“Self-driving cars could make some kinds of attacks impossible. But they can also make other types of attacks possible,” Jeffrey Lewis, a lecturer in the International Studies Program for The Ohio State University who studies terrorism, told ABC News.

Researchers at San Jose State University counted 184 vehicle-ramming attacks worldwide over almost five decades beginning in 1970. Such attacks became “more frequent and lethal” starting in 2014, the study said.

The U.S. government has warned about the terrorist threat posed by car-ramming attacks. “Vehicle ramming offers terrorists with limited access to explosives or weapons an opportunity to conduct a Homeland attack with minimal prior training or experience,” the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice said in a joint memo in 2010.

Authorities don’t believe any other suspects were involved in the attack in New Orleans on Wednesday, the FBI said.

The New Year's attack exemplifies the tall task faced by law enforcement in such cases, since protective barricades were out of use for repairs and a person acting alone offers little opportunity for intelligence gathering, Mia Bloom, a professor of communication and Middle East studies at Georgia State University who examines terrorism, told ABC news.

“A lone wolf is nearly impossible to detect,” Bloom said.

At least in theory, a self-driving car could largely render a mass-killing attack of this type impossible, some experts said.

In 2021, the United Nations Office of Counterterrorism published a report positing that self-driving cars could help thwart vehicle-ramming attacks.

“There are grounds to believe that safety features enabling them to detect and avoid a situation such as a collision with pedestrians, engaging the braking system or setting the vehicle on an alternative course, would frustrate terrorist plots to use such vehicles in this manner,” the report said.

Even in the absence of barriers, a self-driving car would’ve stopped short of harming the crowd assembled in New Orleans on Wednesday, Missy Cummings, a professor of systems engineering and director of Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center at George Mason University, told ABC News.

“If passenger cars could get down Bourbon street, the car would’ve gone there but it never would’ve accelerated through a group of pedestrians,” Cummings said.

Still, some experts warned of the terrorism risks presented by self-driving cars, including the possibility of a hack that could override the navigation system and send the car into a crowd. A large-scale hack could ensnare a city in traffic or ensure a specific vehicle stands vulnerable, Cummings added.

“You could put a car in the line of sight of a sniper on a building,” Cummings said.

To be sure, the prospect of wide -- let alone mandatory -- adoption of self-driving cars remains uncertain and is at best a long-term consideration, experts said.

Some companies offer self-driving taxis in select cities, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. But full self-driving cars face restrictions from regulators and skepticism from consumers.

For now, the best tactic for stopping a vehicle-ramming attack is a familiar one, Bloom said, noting that even loan-wolf suspects sometimes share plans ahead of time with a friend or relative.

“If you see something, say something,” Bloom said.