How Safety Standards for Autonomous Vehicles will Help Reduce Serious Car Accidents

There’s no doubt that a serious car accident can upend your life. If you are the victim of a bad collision, you could find yourself not only out of work for a long period of time, but you could be disabled for life. There is also the possibility of death.

Says OPO Injury Lawyers, an auto accident lawyer in Southern California, every six seconds a vehicular accident happens in the U.S. alone. For lots of auto accident victims, the impact can be very serious or even life-threatening. More than 37,000 people die in car accidents each year while many more are paralyzed or maimed for life. In Los Angeles, for instance, car crashes are said to be the fourth leading cause of death, topping even homicides, lung cancer, and stroke.

What’s one of the major causes of bad vehicular accidents? Human error. That is, drivers who are distracted at the wheel by looking at their phones, or drivers who are drunk and impaired by drugs, or drivers who trying to tend to a child who’s seated in the back. These are all recipes for automotive disaster.

But what about the ongoing development of the autonomous vehicle? Will modern high technology make the roads far safer when the human element is seriously diminished or even negated altogether? According to a new report by the U.S. government sponsored publication, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology),lots of folks are said to be enthusiastic about the development of automated or self-driving cars.

This new technology promises to free vehicle owners from the stress associated with driving. Automated vehicles will almost certainly reduce deadly accidents caused by driver’s poor judgement or distraction. Cars are now equipped with automated features such as emergency braking, headlight activation, avoidance and detection systems, and much more. Most vehicles will be powered with artificial intelligence (AI) to help vehicles drive more safely than ever before (the same thing is happening with commercial jetliners).

With this is mind, why aren’t tons of autonomous vehicles flooding the market now? There’s still a lot of technology engineers have yet to perfect includingtotally automated driving, how to measure driving performance, and making certain an automated vehicles drive safely in general.

Human Driving Is Difficult to Automate

Drivers who’ve been at it a long time possess the ability to make quick decisions instinctively, such as braking quickly if a deer runs out into the road. It’s still difficult to describe that type of instinct to a machine even with AI and the proper sensor equipment. Teaching a car to drive like a human has become a bigger engineering and scientific challenge than previously believed.

Driving isn’t an entirely individual skill, so much as a collective effort. Each driver occupying the road communicates with other drivers, plus cyclists, and pedestrians to get safely to their destination. On top of this, drivers are required to interact with a major infrastructure that’s focused on effective and safe vehicle operations, like signage, changing traffic patterns, and traffic lights.

Every one of these aspects of the human driving experience like driver collaborations, interacting with road infrastructure, instinctive decisions, are absolutely required to make automated driving a success. Many experts are said to believe that humans still possess the edge over today’s self-driving tech. However, the technology is improving more and more each day.

The government along with business and industry partners are said to be working toward the replication of human driving for automated vehicles or AVs, along with constructing a supporting infrastructure. The engineering effort will require human abilities and limitations, local and regional planning, and further technical development. The ultimate goal, of course, is to deploy autonomous or self-driving vehicles that not only operate effectively but safely, thereby reducing fatal accidents dramatically.

Automated Vehicles Still Require Extensive Testing to Ensure Safety

Driverless vehicles possess the ability to be tested more extensively than human driven vehicles. The testing is also less expensive since the driver is not a human being but instead, computer software. Driverless vehicle simulations can be tested using less time when compared to human-involved public road or test track operations.

The autonomous simulations include a variety of models of cars, SUVs, trucks, and vans in all driving environments, many of them considered critical. In other words, the testing scenarios automated vehicles encounter include such critical elements as total vehicle failure or even cyberattack. Is it possible an outside influence could hack into your car’s computer system and take over control of the vehicle? It’s not out of the question by any means. But it’s the testing for these issues that can increase the confidence in autonomous vehicles.

The manufacturers of traditional vehicles systems and test parts like brakes and steering components are said to be working closely with AV scientists. But with the parts typically being proprietary in terms of a manufacturer’s specifications, the testers are reluctant to share the results of what’s considered comprehensive testing. Organizations and regulators who are responsible for safety therefore cannot confirm the results of the tests or the testing methods and measuring procedure utilized.

NIST’s Role in in the Drive Toward Autonomous Vehicles

Enter the NIST when it comes to the development of autonomous vehicles. The government organization’s role is said to mainly be to standardize and develop measurement methods. The methods and measurements are vital to the development of self-driving vehicles and their overall safety on the road.

BIST is said to be focused on building a consensus among parties concerned with the measurements required to evaluate AV safety. They’re also determined to construct reliable methods for measurement. NIST scientists are presently using driverless prototypes to develop these measurement methods.

Recently, the NIST partnered with vehicle stakeholders plus the National Highway Safety Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and other university research institutions and industry representatives.

NIST and the partners involved started at the start, as it were, by defining the concept of an AV’s “operational design domain” or ODD. This is a vocabulary that’s made up of names for the various conditions a vehicle can possibly operate in, such as heavy snowfall and rainfall. Each of the conditions are tested separately.

In the end, the NIST and its partners are interested in one overall goal. That is, the safety of autonomous vehicles. Their value will not lie so much in relieving the stress a human being goes through every time he gets behind the wheel, but in greatly reducing the number of deaths that occur annually due to serious car crashes.