Citation

Liu P, Yang R, Xu Z. Risk Anal. 2019; 39(2): 315-325.

Affiliation

School of Information Engineering, Chang'an University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Society for Risk Analysis, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/risa.13116

PMID

29783277

Abstract

Self-driving vehicles (SDVs) promise to considerably reduce traffic crashes. One pressing concern facing the public, automakers, and governments is "How safe is safe enough for SDVs?" To answer this question, a new expressed-preference approach was proposed for the first time to determine the socially acceptable risk of SDVs. In our between-subject survey (N = 499), we determined the respondents' risk-acceptance rate of scenarios with varying traffic-risk frequencies to examine the logarithmic relationships between the traffic-risk frequency and risk-acceptance rate. Logarithmic regression models of SDVs were compared to those of human-driven vehicles (HDVs); the results showed that SDVs were required to be safer than HDVs. Given the same traffic-risk-acceptance rates for SDVs and HDVs, their associated acceptable risk frequencies of SDVs and HDVs were predicted and compared. Two risk-acceptance criteria emerged: the tolerable risk criterion, which indicates that SDVs should be four to five times as safe as HDVs, and the broadly acceptable risk criterion, which suggests that half of the respondents hoped that the traffic risk of SDVs would be two orders of magnitude lower than the current estimated traffic risk. The approach and these results could provide insights for government regulatory authorities for establishing clear safety requirements for SDVs.

© 2018 Society for Risk Analysis.

Language: en

Keywords

Broadly acceptable risk criterion; expressed-preference approach; self-driving vehicles; socially acceptable risk; tolerable risk criterion