“HOW SAFE IS SAFE ENOUGH FOR AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES?”

THIS MOST COGENT QUESTION is addressed by a Carnegie Mellon associate professor who has written a book on this crucial topic. 

Professor Philip Koopman has also written an article in the April 2023 edition of SAE International’s Update: News & Insights for Mobility Professionals. Here are tidbits gleaned from this article.

Infallible Computers?? “Some industry advocates,” Koopman observes, “would have us believe that computer drivers will be better than human drivers because humans make mistakes. So presumably computer software is perfect? Really? Increasing automotive software recall rates tell a different story.”

Safe as a Human Driver? Koopman posits rhetorically, “Why don’t we just go with ‘at least as safe as a human driver’ and leave it it that? While that has intuitive appeal, it begs the question of which human driver, driving which vehicle, under which conditions. Moreover, an average safety target overlooks the potential risk transfer to vulnerable groups of road users.”

The Infamous Trolley Problem. Koopman says, “If an AV fleet regularly gets itself into situations that require a nuanced argument of whom to kill, it is probably too dangerous to be operating on public roads in the first place.”

Which Human?  “It seems pretty reasonable,” Koopman says, “to want an AV that is at least as safe as an unimpaired, undistracted driver behaving responsibly on the road. Not driving drunk is one of the reasons so often given that AVs will be safer, right?”

“Even if not drunk,” Koopman imagines, “what if every AV drove like a 16-year-old with a new license? Perhaps we’d prefer the equivalent of an experienced middle-age driver with a crash rate many times lower. Or even a 70-year-old with experience and maturity that more than compensates for slower reflexes (seriously—look at the data in the figure).” 

AV Improvements. Koopman says, “While one hopes that AVs will get better at driving over time, we probably don’t want to suffer several years of having a fleet of robotaxis all driving like teenagers in our urban areas.” 

And Which Areas? Koopman cites individual state fatality rates ranging from “0.51 per 100M miles (Massachusetts) to 1.73 (South Carolina), with a U.S. average of 1.11 based on 2019 data.”

Also, within a state, Pennsylvania, for example, “fatalities are five times more frequent per mile on rural state highways than on the PA Turnpike.”

In Which Vehicles? In comparing “apples to apples,” Koopman observes, “The age and type of vehicle matters as well.” The fleet-average 12-year-old vehicle has fewer and older safety features than a new, high-end car.

Summarizing. “In short,” Koopman says, “AV safety should be compared with good, unimpaired drivers on the same roads in the same operating conditions in comparable vehicles with a decent suite of non-autonomous safety features. That will set the ‘safe enough’ bar much higher than a simple U.S. national average for initial deployments.”

Stakeholders Frozen Out. “The current situations in the U.S.,” Koopman says on a disturbing note, “is that there is no credible regulatory oversight of AV safety before deployment…. Other stakeholders [not just those developing the technology] such as consumer safety advocates, community governments, and equity advocates are being frozen out of the conversation due to industry-sponsored state laws that prohibit cities from having a say in AV testing operations on their own streets.”

I am tempted to italicize the preceding paragraph. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023