Automated driving: Not losing sight of safety
It will be a long time before the first self-driving cars hit the market. But a transitional phase is already beginning, in which increasingly assisted and automated driving will bring new challenges for road safety. Further research is therefore needed - as a basis for this, the BFU has published a report on automated driving. For the BFU, it is clear that safety must not be lost sight of despite all the enthusiasm about the introduction of automated vehicles. After all, every level of automation brings new problems.
Automated vehicles raise great hopes for the Road safetybecause a large proportion of accidents today are due to human error. However, until a possible safety effect becomes apparent and until many self-driving cars are reliably on the road in daily traffic, a long transition phase is still to be expected - during which there could even be more accidents due to new challenges for road safety.
Each level has its own problems
In so-called partially automated driving, humans are largely relieved of the driving task, but they must monitor the car and its surroundings in order to be able to quickly take corrective action in the event of errors. "However, reliable data monitoring succeeds for 20 minutes at most," warns Markus Deublein, an expert on automated driving at the BFU.
In the next higher level of automation, conditionally automated driving, continuous monitoring is no longer required. The driver is allowed to read a book, for example. However, the human must, if the Vehicle can spontaneously take over again - without having enough time to get a picture of the situation. Wrong actions are preprogrammed here.
Within an approved range independently drives a Car in highly automated driving. Humans no longer have to take over when the system reaches its limits. "A central problem here is that automated vehicles and other road users speak different languages and don't understand each other at first," explains Markus Deublein. What is needed are coherent communication concepts and uniform technical solutions for the future, which means globally and intuitively understandable signals on the part of the vehicle. But the vehicle must also be able to reliably recognize and correctly interpret body signals and other nonverbal cues.
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