Driving to safety: How many miles of driving would it take to demonstrate autonomous vehicle reliability?

How safe are autonomous vehicles? The answer is critical for determining how autonomous vehicles may shape motor vehicle safety and public health, and for developing sound policies to govern their deployment. One proposed way to assess safety is to test drive autonomous vehicles in real traffic, observe their performance, and make statistical comparisons to human driver performance. This approach is logical, but it is practical? In this paper, the authors calculate the number of miles of driving that would be needed to provide clear statistical evidence of autonomous vehicle safety. Given that current traffic fatalities and injuries are rare events compared to vehicle miles traveled, the authors show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles—an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use. These findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability. And yet, the possibility remains that it will not be possible to establish with certainty the safety of autonomous vehicles. Uncertainty will remain. Therefore, it is imperative that autonomous vehicle regulations are adaptive—designed from the outset to evolve with the technology so that society can better harness the benefits and manage the risks of these rapidly evolving and potentially transformative technologies.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2016.09.010
• Record URL:
  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856416302129
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/09658564
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Kalra, Nidhi
  • Paddock, Susan M
• Publication Date: 2016-12

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 182-193
• Serial:
  • Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice
  • Volume: 94
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 0965-8564
  • Serial URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09658564

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Driving; Innovation; Intelligent vehicles; Regulation; Reliability; Significance (Statistics); Vehicle miles of travel; Vehicle safety; Vehicle tests
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01619126
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Dec 21 2016 11:29AM