Autonomous Vehicles Cannot Be Test-Driven Enough Miles to Demonstrate Their Safety

RAND Corporation report

Autonomous vehicles would have to drive hundreds of millions of miles and, in some cases, hundreds of billions of miles to generate enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety, according to a new RAND report. As a result, alternative testing methods must be developed to supplement on-the-road testing, which could be in the form of accelerated testing, virtual testing and simulators, mathematical modeling, scenario testing, and pilot studies.

Researchers caution it may not be possible to establish with certainty the reliability of autonomous vehicles prior to making them available for public use. The researchers say in parallel to creating new testing methods, it is imperative to develop regulations and policies that can evolve with the technology.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, motor vehicle accidents are a leading cause of premature death in the United States and are responsible for over $80 billion annually in medical care and lost productivity due to injuries. Autonomous vehicles hold enormous potential for managing this crisis and researchers say autonomous vehicles could significantly reduce the number of accidents caused by human error.

Although the total number of crashes, injuries, and fatalities from human drivers is high, the rate of these failures is low in comparison with the number of miles that people drive. “The most autonomous miles any developer has logged are about 1.3 million, and that took several years,” says RAND study co-author Susan M. Paddock. “This is important data, but it does not come close to the level of driving that is needed to calculate safety rates. Even if autonomous vehicle fleets are driven 10 million miles, one still would not be able to draw statistical conclusions about safety and reliability.”  Read the RAND report.

DCL: The full report can be downloaded from the RAND website. This post should be compared with our previous post on the EU experiment with autonomous trucking https://complexevents.com/2016/04/14/a-fleet-of-self-driving-trucks-rumbles-across-europe/. Essentially the report analyzes the statistics involved in establishing safety standards for autonomous vehicles. I.e., how many miles autonomous vehicles would have to be driven to demonstrate that their failure rate is statistically significantly lower than the human driver failure rate. It does not consider improvements in the control technology such as better on-board CEP engines.  The report is worth a read, if only to argue with it!