National

Safety and cybersecurity are generally pursued by separate teams within AV companies — leaving them in silos that exacerbate the significant challenges of each, and ignore the fact that they both fundamentally protect drivers and passengers from harm.

Why it matters: As cars become increasingly complex, modifying one aspect of the technology could create an unexpected vulnerability in another feature, making it crucial to develop safety and cybersecurity as integrated systems.

Safety: We know that traditional vehicles are safe because they conform to industry standards, regulations and engineering best practices. This can cover airbag systems at one end of the spectrum, and ADAS emergency braking features at the other. 

AV standards have yet to be created, so AVs can't demonstrate compliance the way traditional vehicles do. A standardized framework, which could involve simulations or real life driving tests, is needed to measure how safe AVs are.

Cybersecurity: Concerns about vulnerabilities in vehicle electronics predate modern AVs, yet even as connected vehicle technology and automated driving features become more popular there is no international standard governing vehicle cybersecurity.

The International Organization for Standardization is currently working on cybersecurity standards for vehicles. 

A joint approach to standards could optimize safety and cybersecurity and reduce overall risks to AV operation. Vulnerabilities already evidenced at low levels of automation point to the multitude of threats highly automated vehicles could face, especially where their systems intersect. 

Cyberattacks can take many routes into a car, including bluetooth-enabled systems and cellular radio. Adding network-based features and software will likely add vulnerability.

Traffic signs can be misread by AVs in dangerous ways, and hackers could intentionally make a vehicle misinterpret a stop sign, for example — an attack that would compromise cybersecurity and safety features simultaneously.

The bottom line: The teams developing these systems should be collaborating on this challenge. Improving public trust in AVs, which remains low, will require delivering on promises in both of these critical areas.

Marjory S. Blumenthal is a senior policy researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

Why AV safety and cybersecurity need to be pursued in tandem

The complex, intersecting systems of AVs create new vulnerabilities.

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Transportation

Cybersecurity

Expert Voices

Technology

Safety and cybersecurity are generally pursued by separate teams within AV companies — leaving them in silos that exacerbate the significant challenges of each, and ignore the fact that they both fundamentally protect drivers and passengers from harm.Why it matters: As cars become increasingly complex, modifying one aspect of the technology could create an unexpected vulnerability in another feature, making it crucial to develop safety and cybersecurity as integrated systems.

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Autonomous vehicle developers are pursuing different strategies and technologies — and making different claims, in different ways, about their systems. Those differences make it hard to compare vehicle safety across companies and evaluate the safety of AVs overall.

Why it matters: The success of driverless vehicles will in large part depend on how safe the public perceives them to be. That involves creating trust between riders and vehicle manufacturers — and speaking the same language about safety.

Details: Absent hundreds of millions (or more) of miles driven, it's impossible to arrive at firm conclusions about safety. 

Companies report how many miles their test vehicles have driven, without disclosing what kinds of miles, how good or bad the weather, how dense the traffic, whether in daytime or at night and so on.

Since AV crashes have been rare during development, other gauges are needed. An overarching safety framework would help to assess where an AV is in its path from early development to deployment.

Such a framework could span different settings for testing (simulation, closed courses, public roads) and stages of AV development and deployment.

Infractions, tracking how often an AV violates traffic laws.

Roadmanship, appraising whether an AV is safely navigating traffic by considering factors like the following distance it maintains and whether it seems prone to near misses with others on the road.

Disengagements, counting when a human driver must take control of the vehicle — an imperfect measure, because drivers have different levels of risk aversion and receive different instructions from their companies, but widely used because of California’s early requirement to report them.

Crashes and injuries, counting actual consequences of accidents or other safety events using standardized guidance for how to rate severity.

What to watch: The Department of Transportation recently updated its guidance on AVs and called for the industry to voluntarily collaborate on safety standards and best practices.

Yes, but: Technical standards may unite the industry, but given their intrinsic generality they are not sufficient for demonstrating safety.

A universal framework can provide a more consistent and transparent view of progress in AV safety within and across the industry, better informing the public and policymakers.

Marjory S. Blumenthal is a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation and a former executive director of the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Go deeper: Read RAND's proposed framework

The new AV challenge: creating a universal safety framework

Technical standards don't provide sufficient assurance on their own.

A Ford self-driving vehicle. Photo: Calla Kessler/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Safety

Future

Autonomous vehicle developers are pursuing different strategies and technologies — and making different claims, in different ways, about their systems. Those differences make it hard to compare vehicle safety across companies and evaluate the safety of AVs overall.Why it matters: The success of driverless vehicles will in large part depend on how safe the public perceives them to be. That involves creating trust between riders and vehicle manufacturers — and speaking the same language about safety.

Stories

Why AV safety and cybersecurity need to be pursued in tandem

The new AV challenge: creating a universal safety framework