Are Automated Vehicles Safer than Manually Driven Cars?
This work identifies key barriers to assessing AV safety, which is crucial for policymakers and the automotive industry, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing debates without new data or methods.
The paper addresses the challenge of determining whether automated vehicles are safer than manually driven cars, highlighting that unresolved measurement, tracking, and definition issues prevent a conclusive answer.
Are automated vehicles really safer than manually driven vehicles? If so, how would we know? Answering this question has spurred a contentious debate. Unfortunately, several issues make answering this question difficult for the foreseeable future. First, how do we measure safety? Second, how can we keep track of automated vehicle (AV) safety? Finally, how do we determine what is or what is not an AV? Until these questions are addressed, it will continue to be difficult to determine whether or when AVs might really be safer than manually driven vehicles.