The Nature of Automated Vehicle Safety: Will SAE Level 5 Ever Be Achieved?

The automated vehicle industry has been busy designing, developing, and deploying several self driving vehicles and services in the last few years. However, much of the outcomes and the overall outlook of the vehicle and services, such as robotaxis, are not great. Customers and stakeholders complain that the level of automation is low, mostly SAE Levels 1, 2, and very little of Level 3. It appears that Level 4 is far out in the horizon and many wonder if Level 5 is actually achievable.

Customers complain that the levels of functionality, operability, performance, safety, reliability, and availability of the vehicles and the services they offer is rather poor with little signs of this improving drastically anytime soon. Automated vehicles running into parked police and ambulances, injuring and killing people, and not being widely accepted by the public are just sample of recent issues that continue to grow.

The recent experience of Cruise and Waymo offering robotaxi services in San Francisco has uncovered a new host of operational, safety, operability, reliability, and availability issues that were overlooked by everyone. Robotaxis blocking first responders such as firefighters and police seem to be the norm nowadays. Why is there a wealth of issues that all of a sudden is blocking the development and deployment of automated vehicles? What happened to the euphoria for the vision on automated vehicles that existed just a few years ago? Developing, manufacturing, and deploying automated vehicles and associated services is turning out to be much harder than anyone thought. There are just too many issues and contingencies that nobody considered before the rush to develop and deploy this new type of vehicles. The same for services based on automated vehicles such as robotaxis.

One can blame a host of reasons, such as the insufficient research and development by the entire industry including academia and the rush to dominate the industry by some companies. In this course, several topics have been assembled to provide the participant an outlook on the nature of automated vehicle safety and as a group, we will attempt to answer the question as to whether an automated vehicle at Level 5 can ever be achieved.

Feature of this Course – Short breakout exercises are available to be worked out at the end of each section. These exercises will be performed in groups ranging from 3 to 5 participants per group. The exercises answer important questions or tackle important issues on the topic in question. Experience has shown that participants learn a great deal from one another and often get important insights on the issues at hand. For this reason, students should bring their laptops to class.