Self-driving cars: Watch a self-driving car test drive
Fasten your seatbelt, get in your self-driving car and stay informed. For the Detroit Three automakers, much of the technology is already in place.
- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration collects crash data on self-driving cars, but has only issued voluntary guidelines about expectations for self-driving cars.
- These guidelines were relaxed in April after industry groups successfully lobbied President Donald Trump’s administration to grant further waivers for safety testing.
If a 16-year-old needs to take a test to determine if they’re roadworthy, why shouldn’t they be given a self-driving car?
After all, we’ve all driven behind someone who stopped at a flashing yellow light or got confused by four cars entering a four-way stop at the same time. How do we know self-driving cars can handle these situations?
The idea had been circulating within the University of Michigan for years, even before the university’s mobility lab Mcity published its own tests on highly automated vehicles in 2019.
Four years later, on Oct. 2, the question remained when the university hosted a panel discussion with industry experts in Ann Arbor, Michigan, titled “How Secure Is Enough?”
That’s because there are still no federal standards to determine whether these vehicles on our roads meet the skills and abilities we expect from teenagers, and the industry is still pushing for self-driving cars.
So, how safe is safe enough?
“It’s a corporate decision that every AV company is making on their own right now,” said Greg Stevens, who is currently leading research at the Mcity test facility. Stevens, the former head of Ford Motor Co.’s advanced driver-assistance system called BlueCruise, added: ”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration collects crash data on self-driving cars, but has only issued voluntary guidelines about expectations for self-driving cars.
These guidelines were relaxed in April after industry groups successfully lobbied President Donald Trump’s administration to grant further waivers for safety testing. Currently, automakers don’t have to share many details about why or how vehicles equipped with certain advanced driver-assistance or autonomous driving systems are involved in accidents, nor are there any tests these vehicles must pass before offering self-driving (such as yielding without stopping on a flashing yellow light) or even how to pull over when an ambulance passes by.
To make matters worse, the number of investigators investigating AV safety is decreasing. NHTSA will lose 4% of its workforce in 2025 amid efforts to reduce probationary employees across federal agencies.
The Washington Post reported that a group within NHTSA dedicated to investigating safety concerns about so-called self-driving technology had just seven people. Three of those seven were lost in the cut.
“The ability of AV developers, investors, automakers, and consumers to realize their full potential is hampered by government inaction,” John Bozella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said this spring. “The time has come for America to move to the next phase of self-driving, and to do so we urgently need a regulatory framework and a pathway to the final and complete adoption of self-driving vehicles in the country.”
Who decides what is safe?
In the absence of federal standards, states that allow autonomous vehicles (AVs) to circulate must develop their own rules. Currently, 16 states in the United States have no laws regarding this technology.
The Department of Transportation’s new self-driving vehicle policy aims to accelerate the national rollout of autonomous vehicles, but it does not address what UM researchers believe is the most important barrier for AVs: the lack of national safety performance testing standards.
Ensuring that cars can merge onto the freeway without incident or always stop before hitting a pedestrian are just some of the areas that Mcity researchers determined self-driving cars must cross.
Greg McGuire, managing director at Mcity, said that if a test like the one devised at the university were adopted at the federal level, it would likely allay consumer concerns before getting into a self-driving car. Standardized tests that are viewed by the public, criticized and improved over time can only improve the functionality of these systems and make their actual capabilities more transparent.
“The public has no way of looking at a particular company, Company A or Company B, and knowing that this company has done good engineering and is actually trustworthy, but this company is cutting corners,” McGuire told the Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network. “The systems on the road look the same, but the risk profiles are very different.”
While other safety agencies in the U.S. and around the world are working to develop similar tests, McGuire said no one has come up with a way to calculate the probability of an AV accident that the public would accept. Even robotaxi company Waymo, which shares its safety data publicly, can’t articulate how much better its Waymo driver system is than a human, he said.
However, according to the latest safety data, Waymo has calculated several key areas where human drivers fall short of Waymo’s track record. Waymo vehicles have reduced crashes with serious injuries by 91% and pedestrian crashes with injuries by 92% compared to the same distance traveled by an average human driver in the cities where we operate.
In addition to involving the public, local governments want to be more involved in the process of determining the safety of self-driving cars before opening their doors to them.
Ryan Russo, executive director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), said in a letter to NHTSA that when city representatives are responsible for road safety, it is not enough to leave the entire verification process to automakers and tech companies.
The letter was submitted to regulators in response to a request for comment on proposed voluntary rules for self-driving systems, weighing the pros and cons of deploying the technology on a large scale. The proposed rule is the ADS-Equipped Vehicle Safety, Transparency, and Evaluation Program, known as AV STEP.
“As proposed, AV STEP would provide the industry with near-complete oversight over the design, deployment, operation, and safety definition of vehicles, all while remaining unknown to consumers, passengers, and the traveling public,” Russo’s letter said. “NACTO, on behalf of local government officials who are most often responsible for road safety, requests that city officials be deeply involved in the investigation and reporting of participating vehicles.”
Done properly, autonomous vehicles offer an opportunity to make our roads safer, increase access to transportation for communities without reliable public transportation, and increase America’s competitiveness in international markets, Russo wrote. But if done haphazardly, introducing AVs to American streets will make cities less safe and more crowded.
How does that test work?
McGuire said that designing tests will not prevent companies from self-certifying the safety of their products, “but companies will need to publicly demonstrate that they have tested these AI-based systems and passed them through some level of rigor before deployment.”
Mcity researchers first published details of an AV safety test they developed in 2019 following several high-profile incidents involving self-driving vehicle technology. This is called the Mcity ABC test, where “A” stands for “Accelerated Assessment,” “B” stands for “Behavioral Capability Scenario,” and “C” stands for “Corner Case Test” (also known as a fringe case), where AVs are asked to deal with unexpected training situations.
University researchers compiled a total of 50 capability scenarios, but focused on seven to highlight the areas most needed for AVs to safely achieve before being considered roadworthy.
- merge onto the highway
- join the rotary
- A vehicle cuts in front of another vehicle on the highway
- A vehicle door opens in the path of another vehicle
- Deer in the path of a vehicle turning a blind curve
- Pedestrians crossing an intersection at a crosswalk without obeying traffic lights
- The final test, an unprotected left turn, is when an AV needs to turn left while crossing a divided lane with no stop signs or streetlights to stop oncoming traffic.
The ABC test later evolved into the current Mcity Safety Evaluation Program and was first used in 2023 to evaluate May Mobility vehicles ahead of the Detroit Pilot Program. The vehicle was tested in two ways. One is the “driving license test,” which measures basic ability in normal traffic scenarios, and the other is the “driving intelligence test,” which is designed to challenge AV software with more dangerous simulations that are statistically more common in causing vehicle crashes, injuries, and fatalities.
“We believe the Mcity Safety Assessment Program will serve as a blueprint for a publicly visible safety framework that will help bring self-driving vehicle technology to market in a way that truly benefits society,” Mcity Director Henry Liu said in a statement.
While this test is a good start, some on the committee on October 2 added that it may also be necessary to test the “vehicle’s senses”, particularly the technology used to “see” and “hear” on the road.
Jean-Paul Velez, autonomous vehicle policy leader for the San Francisco County Department of Transportation, said there is a need to test vehicles in ways that are natural to humans.
“What we saw in San Francisco is that once fully driverless driving began, many of these vehicles started failing at things that human drivers wouldn’t necessarily fail at, such as driving as if there were emergency response vehicles on the road,” he said. Driverless cars “have a bit of a hard time pulling to the side or improvising a stop in situations where you need to do something a little more extraordinary than normal traffic rules.”
Cooper Lohr, senior policy analyst for transportation and safety at Consumer Reports, cited a nationally representative survey on fully self-driving technology conducted in late 2024 that found nearly 70% of consumers reported wanting stronger safety standards for self-driving cars than for regular passenger cars, and nearly 60% said they supported things like vision tests. Yes, even humans have to go through one of them.
“The broad takeaway from this is that consumers want adoption of this technology based on some binding and measurable criteria,” he said. “I think a lot of that comfort lies in the scenario of them taking over the driving duties, because the safety promises and potential safety benefits are not just assumed, they have to be proven.”
Jackie Charniga covers General Motors for the Free Press. Contact me at jcharniga@freepress.com.
