My Precious Crash Data: Barriers and Opportunities in Encouraging Autonomous Driving Companies to Share Safety-Critical Data
It addresses the problem of limited data sharing for improving autonomous vehicle safety, which affects regulators, researchers, and the public, but is incremental as it builds on existing concerns without proposing a novel solution.
This paper investigates why autonomous vehicle companies are reluctant to share safety-critical data like crash records, identifying two key barriers: internal politics due to the resource-intensive nature of datasets and the perception of safety knowledge as private competitive assets rather than public goods.
Safety-critical data, such as crash and near-crash records, are crucial to improving autonomous vehicle (AV) design and development. Sharing such data across AV companies, academic researchers, regulators, and the public can help make all AVs safer. However, AV companies rarely share safety-critical data externally. This paper aims to pinpoint why AV companies are reluctant to share safety-critical data, with an eye on how these barriers can inform new approaches to promote sharing. We interviewed twelve AV company employees who actively work with such data in their day-to-day work. Findings suggest two key, previously unknown barriers to data sharing: (1) Datasets inherently embed salient knowledge that is key to improving AV safety and are resource-intensive. Therefore, data sharing, even within a company, is fraught with politics. (2) Interviewees believed AV safety knowledge is private knowledge that brings competitive edges to their companies, rather than public knowledge for social good. We discuss the implications of these findings for incentivizing and enabling safety-critical AV data sharing, specifically, implications for new approaches to (1) debating and stratifying public and private AV safety knowledge, (2) innovating data tools and data sharing pipelines that enable easier sharing of public AV safety data and knowledge; (3) offsetting costs of curating safety-critical data and incentivizing data sharing.