Automated Vehicle Safety and Deployment: Lessons from Human Crashes

Traffic crashes claim more than 36,000 lives every year in the US, with economic costs amounting to $836B. Automated Vehicles (AVs) promise to usher in a future with near-zero crashes. It seems likely that widespread deployment of AVs will eliminate the large number of crashes caused by impaired, distracted or reckless drivers. However, it is unclear whether AVs will be able to avoid a significant fraction of the remaining crashes for which no driver is directly responsible. As such, deploying AVs without adequately assessing their safety capabilities might lead to an increase in crashes rather than a reduction. In this paper, we discuss how an analysis of human crashes can provide insights about the types of crashes that remain challenging for AVs and the role of connected infrastructure in addressing them. We also discuss how human crashes and driving data can be valuable in inferring safety capabilities of AVs in diverse driving contexts. Based on these observations, we provide suggestions for policies and regulations governing the deployment of AVs.