Self-driven vehicles (SDV) are arguably one of the most exciting technological advancements to be developed in the last few years. While there are some great benefits to SDVs, they have also been involved in quite a few accidents and even a couple of deaths in the last few months.
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People have a hard time trusting new technological developments. It has been proven that people are having a hard time fully trusting robots and artificial intelligence (AI), and SDVs are no exception. In order for people to completely trust any technology, complete and total safety has to be proven and obvious. A team of researchers from Tianjin University and Chang’an University has gathered information from a study on why people don’t trust SDVs and what needs to be done in order to gain trust.
While people have a low level of trust of SDVs, human-driven vehicles (HDVs) aren’t perfectly safe either. In the U.S. 94 percent of accidents are caused by human error, and 75 percent of all accidents in the U.K. are caused by human error. SDVs significantly reduce human error, but they still have risks, including accidents due to cyber-attacks.
In order to gather information during the study, the researchers used the expressed-preference approach, which has not been used before in a study of SDVs. This approach was used to determine what the socially acceptable approach to SDVs is. The researchers sent a survey to residents in Tianjin, China. There were 499 people who responded to the survey. Half of the participants were given a survey that had a complete version of the study for HDVs and the other half were given an SDV version of the study. The survey gave the participants a car risk frequency as one fatality per a certain number of a population. The respondents indicated how much they were comfortable with a situation for each traffic list with four options to indicate their level of acceptance.
The results of the study gave researchers an idea of what needs to be changed and improved before people fully trust SDVs. According to the survey, SDVs need to be 4-5 times safer than HDVs. This means that the current rate of road fatalities needs to be reduced by 75-80 percent. Basically, there needs to be an improvement of HDV risk a hundredfold. When a technology is self-controlled, or not controlled by humans, the demand for safety is much higher than human controlled technology.
Making SDVs perfectly technologically safe is not going to be an easy task. But lawmakers could develop policies that make SDV risk as low as possible.
"Our results and method may help government authorities to establish clear safety requirements for regulating SDVs and also help SDV manufacturers find consumers' expectations for SDVs that must be met," said Liu, Ph.D., assistant professor of industrial engineering.
The paper on this research was published in Risk Analysis.
