The new role of road testing for the safety validation of automated vehicles

Abstract

There is a difference between developing a vehicle that is driving itself as safely as today’s cars are driven and assessing this vehicle in terms of safety. The current approach to prove this safety is mainly and ultimately based on road testing. This chapter first explains why proving safety of automated vehicles for their first introduction will be economically challenging when using road tests. The argumentation is based on a theory using a statistical approach. In the second part of the chapter, further conclusions are drawn from these findings, and a new universal theory on the introduction of automated systems motivated by an extended statistical point of view is proposed.