2020: When AVs Attack, Who's at Fault?

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Accidents will happen, but agreed-upon standards could go a long way toward building regulator and consumer confidence in robocars.

eetimes.com, Jan. 02, 2020 – 

Robocars will not be accident-free.

For regulators who harbor hopes of fostering a future of autonomous vehicles (AVs), this is a political reality that's likely to haunt them. For the public, it's a psychologically untenable prospect, especially if a robocar happens to flatten a loved one.

From a technological standpoint, though, this inevitability is the starting point for engineers who want to develop safer AVs.

"The safest human driver in the world is the one who never drives," said Jack Weast, Intel's senior principal engineer and Mobileye's vice president for autonomous vehicle standards. He delivered the quip in a tutorial video explaining what the company's Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) entails.

"[Weast] is right," Ian Riches, vice president for the global automotive practice at Strategy Analytics, told EE Times. "The only truly safe vehicle is stationary."

So, if we hope to see commercially available AVs that will actually run on public roads, what must happen?

Before the AV ecosystem can answer that question, it must open a long-overdue dialog on another: Who's to blame when a robocar kills a human? 2020 will be the year the industry at last confronts that demon.

On one hand, AV technology suppliers love to cite such figures as the "1.35 million annual road traffic deaths" reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) when they pitch their highly automated technologies as the ultimate solution to road safety. Eager to paint a rosy picture of zero-collision future, they use the stats to explain why the society needs AVs.

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