[SystemSafety] How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?

[Coq, Thierry]

I wonder, in a systems analysis point of view, how much of the safety is attributable to the human drivers and how much to other factors, such as the infrastructure.

Accidents seem to be clumped, whenever there is a map available. Some roads are particularly prone to traffic accidents. Are these well-designed roads?
For example, accidents on the normal roads seem to be 4x times more likely to happen than on the motorways. Is that a symptom of bad driving or is that a symptom of bad infrastructure? A 4x increase would mean for any systems engineer that the infrastructure is the dominating facture for safety, not the humans.

Would the same happen for autonomous vehicles? When Tesla limits the use of their software to highways, is it the same symptom?
Does it mean than on a badly designed infrastructure, the humans are more able to prevent accidents from happening than an AV?
(it seems most literature is only looking at the “bad” effects of human intervention instead of also looking at the good effects too)

In the future, if the roads were designed for AV, would the safety increase for the AV and decrease for humans, or increase for both?

Is there literature on this subject?

Best regards,
Thierry Coq
www.dnvgl.com<http://www.dnvgl.com/>
The statements expressed here are my own, not those of my employer.

From: systemsafety [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of Mike Ellims
Sent: lundi 13 juin 2016 00:44
To: martyn at thomas-associates.co.uk
Cc: 'Bielefield Safety List'
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?

[…]

Possibly, but the safety of the system in total is dominated by the number of errors that human drivers make. If AV’s are in general significantly safer than human drivers (cause fewer accidents and/or accident severity is lower) then is the case to be made that people shouldn’t be allowed to drive?

[…]


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