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Safe Enough: Approaches to Assessing Acceptable Safety for Automated Vehicles
Stakeholders in the field of automated vehicles (AVs)—from developers to the general public—seek confidence in the safety of these machines. In summer 2019, the Uber Advanced Technologies Group approached the RAND Corporation for help in understanding (a) approaches for establishing that AVs are acceptably safe, and (b) which approaches appeal more and less broadly across different categories of stakeholders. The analysis described in this report builds on material that the Uber Advanced Technologies Group requested of RAND in summer 2017; that research examined how to develop a vendor- and technology-neutral framework for measuring AV safety that could be suitable for broad use, including among developers, and culminated in the 2018 RAND report Measuring Automated Vehicle Safety: Forging a Framework. In our research for both reports, we drew heavily on consultations with participants in the AV industry, industry observers from government, and safety-focused researchers and nonprofit organizations. For this report, we also had the benefit of a novel survey of the general public, complementing comments collected through consultations with other kinds of stakeholders about how the public thinks.
Read the full study here.