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No standard definition of safety exists in regard to AVs

• This report defines safety as the elimination, minimization, or management of harm to the public (with an emphasis on people, although it can include animals and property).
• The public and the policymaking community have an important interest in comparing AV safety with the safety of conventional vehicles, but there are limitations on the breadth and depth of comparable data collected for each type of vehicle.

This report presents a framework to discuss how safety can be measured in a technology- and company-neutral way

• The framework shows measurement possible in different settings (simulation, closed courses, and public roads with and without a safety driver) at different stages (development, demonstration, and deployment).
• The methods of measuring safety must be valid, feasible, reliable, and non-manipulatable. They can be leading (i.e., proxy measures of driving behaviors correlated to safety outcomes) or lagging (i.e., actual safety outcomes involving harm).
• Clearer communication about safety between the industry and the public will be critical for public acceptance of AVs. The more consistent the communication about AV safety from industry, the more cohesive and comprehensible the message will be.

This report presents a framework for measuring safety in automated vehicles (AVs) that could be used broadly by companies, policymakers, and the public. In it, the authors considered how to define safety for AVs, how to measure safety for AVs, and how to communicate what is learned or understood about AVs. Given AVs' limited total on-road exposure compared with conventional, human-driven vehicles, the authors also consider options for proxy measurements — i.e., factors that might be correlated with safety — and explore how safety measurements could be made in simulation and on closed courses. The report identifies key concepts and illuminates the kinds of measurements that might be made and communicated. It presents a structured way of thinking about how to measure safety at different stages of an AV's evolution, and it proposes a new kind of measurement. While acknowledging that the closely held nature of AV data limits the amount of data that are made public or shared between companies and with the government, the report highlights the kinds of information that could be presented in consistent ways in support of public understanding of AV safety.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Safety

• Chapter Three

  Measuring Automated Vehicle Safety

• Chapter Four

  Conclusion