“Every bad news photo hurts the industry,” Philip Koopman, emeritus professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said March 10 during a panel in Washington, D.C., at the National AV Safety Forum, organized by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Koopman is viewed as an internationally recognized expert on autonomous vehicle safety.
“But it hurts, I think, because the narrative is wrong,” Koopman said. “If you’re selling on perfection, every picture makes you look bad. So instead, sell on being a good road user. Sell on, incident by incident: ‘We try and make the fewest mistakes possible, we’re transparent that we fixed it, and when we fixed it, it really stays fixed.’”
The roving debate around AV safety continues to percolate in statehouses, regulatory agencies and in the minds of the traveling public as autonomous robotaxis — a nascent industry poised for expansion — inch their way onto an increasing number of U.S. streets.
Federal officials in Washington, D.C., were quick to offer boosterism for the industry.
“We think it’s past time to get past the hand-waving and hype, and are finally doing the necessary hard policy work to provide appropriate and robust oversight over this sector, while removing unnecessary and unintended barriers to innovation,” Jonathan Morrison, NHTSA administrator, said during opening remarks at the forum, which had strong attendance from officials at AV and technology companies including Waymo, Zoox and Uber.
This year, NHTSA is seeking public comment for what would be a steering wheel-free robotaxi built by Zoox. The agency is also planning to release its next set of technical guidance for AV developers, as part of an objective to both enhance safety, and “give manufacturers clear road maps to move forward,” Sean Duffy, U.S. Department of Transportation secretary, said.
NHTSA is also exploring updating regulations for features like windshield wipers and window defoggers, items designed to make a car safe for human driving in a range of weather conditions — but which are not needed by AVs.
“I think all of this matters. Because we are in a race. Everyone is trying to have the best technology that will be deployed around the world. And I want the technology to be developed in America,” Duffy said. “I want the jobs in America. And I want the rest of the world to use American technology.”
AVs have been championed as the kind of transportation technology that expands mobility options for elderly or disabled Americans, while also addressing pervasive problems like distracted or impaired driving. But however worthwhile these use cases, they can be overshadowed by the safety of the vehicles; or — more to the point — the public’s perception of their safety.
“If a robotaxi does something crazy, you lose confidence in the narrative of, ‘we never drink, we never text, we’re never distracted,’” Koopman said, noting the vehicles are being judged “on an incident-by-incident basis.”
Even though a majority of AV crashes involve no injuries, according to statistics compiled by the Transport Research Centre, some of the more high-profile accidents have garnered headlines and resulted in criminal investigations. Cruise, an autonomous ride-hailing service operated by General Motors, was involved in a high-profile October 2023 crash in which a pedestrian was run over. The company was fined $500,000 following an investigation into the crash, when regulators found the company falsified records. Cruise has pulled back on its robotaxi ambitions, testing a limited number of cars, equipped with human drivers, in several states, according to reporting by Wired.
“Autonomous vehicles cannot make what amounts to negligent mistakes,” Koopman said, meaning that if a human driver would have made that mistake, and it were generally viewed as negligent, then “the robotaxi’s negligent.”
“One of the things that the industry could improve on is public perception of safety,” he said.
