Autonomous Vehicle Testing Safety Needs More Transparency

Last week there were two injuries involving human-supervised autonomous test shuttles on different continents, with no apparent connection other than random chance. (For example: Link ) As deployment of this work-in-progress technology scales up in public, we know that we can expect more high-profile accidents. Fortunately this time nobody was killed or suffered life-altering injuries. (But we still need to find out what actually happened.) And to be sure, human-driven vehicles are far from accident-free. But what about next time? The bigger issue for the industry is: will the next autonomous vehicle testing mishap be due to rare and random problems that are within the bounds of reasonable risk? Or will they be due to safety issues that could and should have been addressed beforehand? Public trust in autonomous vehicle technology has already eroded in the past year. Each new mishap has the unfortunate potential to make that situation worse, regardless of the technical root ca