SAE Update - April 2023 - 33

How safe is safe enough
for autonomous vehicles
ENGINEERING EVENTS
APRIL 18-20, 2023
DETROIT
TM
some small variation, changing the
distribution of harm also matters. A
significant increase in harm to a
demographic or ethnic group by AVs that is
seen as avoidable will result in a verdict of
an AV not being safe enough, even if net
average harm is reduced. From an
engineering point of view, this is a
constrained optimization problem: reduce
overall harm while obeying the constraint
of not dramatically increasing harm to a
sub-group of the general public, especially
vulnerable populations.
Safety has multiple meanings
Across stakeholders, there are many
different operational definitions of what is
sufficiently safe. Ask seven people what it
means for an AV to be safe, and you are
likely to get eight or more answers. Safety
statements range from slogans ( " safety is
our top priority " ), to safety standards
conformance, to highly sophisticated
metrics that predict deployed safety
outcomes, to publicly disclosed detailed
written safety cases, to plans to ensure
safety equity during testing and
deployment.
Rather than picking any single safety
need and accompanying metric as the one
true definition of safety, there will need to
be different aspects of safety that are all
covered. The AV needs to drive in a
reasonable way, but it also needs to
conform to industry-created safety
standards, as well as meet less
UPDATE
quantitative safety expectations of a
variety of stakeholders to be truly safe in
practice.
Deployment governance
The biggest ethical issue for autonomous
vehicle deployment is not the infamous
Trolley Problem. 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.
Rather, the most urgent ethical problem
is ensuring that decisions to deploy AV
technology are made based on input from
relevant stakeholders and result in a
reasonable expectation of acceptable
safety. For example, the people who will
share public roads with this new and still
immature technology should have a say in
establishing defined safety norms for
deployment. Currently they don't.
The current situation in the U.S. is that
there is no credible regulatory oversight of
AV safety before deployment. It is all up to
the companies to get the safety of
automated driving systems right, according
to whatever opaque metrics they choose.
Issuing permits, where it is done, does not
involve a substantive technical assessment
of safety - until after one or more crashes or
scary publicized behaviors might happen to
demonstrate a lack of safety, provoking a
regulatory response.
Deployment decisions should be made
with the involvement of all those impacted
April 2023
33

SAE Update - April 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of SAE Update - April 2023

SAE Update - April 2023 - Cov1
SAE Update - April 2023 - Cov2
SAE Update - April 2023 - 1
SAE Update - April 2023 - 2
SAE Update - April 2023 - 3
SAE Update - April 2023 - 4
SAE Update - April 2023 - 5
SAE Update - April 2023 - 6
SAE Update - April 2023 - 7
SAE Update - April 2023 - 8
SAE Update - April 2023 - 9
SAE Update - April 2023 - 10
SAE Update - April 2023 - 11
SAE Update - April 2023 - 12
SAE Update - April 2023 - 13
SAE Update - April 2023 - 14
SAE Update - April 2023 - 15
SAE Update - April 2023 - 16
SAE Update - April 2023 - 17
SAE Update - April 2023 - 18
SAE Update - April 2023 - 19
SAE Update - April 2023 - 20
SAE Update - April 2023 - 21
SAE Update - April 2023 - 22
SAE Update - April 2023 - 23
SAE Update - April 2023 - 24
SAE Update - April 2023 - 25
SAE Update - April 2023 - 26
SAE Update - April 2023 - 27
SAE Update - April 2023 - 28
SAE Update - April 2023 - 29
SAE Update - April 2023 - 30
SAE Update - April 2023 - 31
SAE Update - April 2023 - 32
SAE Update - April 2023 - 33
SAE Update - April 2023 - 34
SAE Update - April 2023 - 35
SAE Update - April 2023 - 36
SAE Update - April 2023 - 37
SAE Update - April 2023 - 38
SAE Update - April 2023 - 39
SAE Update - April 2023 - 40
SAE Update - April 2023 - 41
SAE Update - April 2023 - 42
SAE Update - April 2023 - 43
SAE Update - April 2023 - 44
SAE Update - April 2023 - 45
SAE Update - April 2023 - 46
SAE Update - April 2023 - 47
SAE Update - April 2023 - 48
SAE Update - April 2023 - 49
SAE Update - April 2023 - 50
SAE Update - April 2023 - 51
SAE Update - April 2023 - 52
SAE Update - April 2023 - 53
SAE Update - April 2023 - 54
SAE Update - April 2023 - 55
SAE Update - April 2023 - 56
SAE Update - April 2023 - 57
SAE Update - April 2023 - 58
SAE Update - April 2023 - 59
SAE Update - April 2023 - 60
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