Automakers ask drivers to trust and share the nation’s roadways with autonomous vehicles, but there is no easy answer as to when they will be considered ”safe”
Tech giants and carmakers have poured massive amounts of money and effort into developing cars that can drive themselves.
But before Google, Tesla, Uber and others can persuade humans to share their streets with bots, they have to prove this technology—although definitely still learning and maturing—doesn’t amount to flooding the nation’s roadways with dangerously adolescent robot drivers.
“Sometimes I hear [the] industry talk about autonomous vehicles as though they’re about to put the safest driver on the road,” says Nidhi Kalra, senior information scientist at the nonprofit RAND Corp.
“The reality is it’s more like putting a teenage driver on the road.” But she still thinks artificially intelligent autos should be able to improve their driving and decision-making skills very quickly—without having to be grounded.
In the self-driving world safety is an extremely complicated issue for a number of reasons. For starters, regulators will have to come up with a definition of “safe”—whether that means the machines must drive flawlessly or simply break fewer laws and get into fewer accidents than human drivers do. Further muddling matters, companies are developing many different levels of automation that range from assisting drivers with braking, parking and lane-changing (referred to as “level 1” abilities) to full autonomy (“level 5”), which is still several years away.
No single test can determine the safety of self-driving cars, says Steven Shladover, a research engineer and manager of the Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology program at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been encouraging U.S. regulators and industry members to follow the example of Germany’s government, which is sponsoring research to determine how best to ensure the safety of automated driving systems. “There is a need for fundamental research to support the development of dependable and affordable methods for assessing the safety of an automated driving system when it is confronted with the full range of traffic hazards,” Shladover says.
Read more of the original article at Scientific American.
