Are Automated Vehicles Safer than Manually Driven Cars?

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges in assessing whether automated vehicles are safer than manual cars, highlighting issues in defining safety, tracking AV safety, and identifying AVs.

Contribution

It clarifies the key challenges and questions that need to be addressed to reliably compare the safety of automated and manual vehicles.

Findings

Measuring safety is complex and lacks standardization.

Tracking AV safety over time is difficult due to data limitations.

Defining what constitutes an AV is not straightforward.

Abstract

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.