Safe Autonomy

The tragic Tesla Paris crash  of December 2021 highlights a completely dysfunctional vehicle defect investigation process. This story is well done, but highlights the usual broken investigation narrative (not fault of reporters): The Paris government says: "no indication" of a "technical fault" Well, did they look at software as a potential cause? Almost certainly not. Does Tesla follow international software safety standards (e.g., ISO26262)? Probably not. So it is a least possible this is a software defect. What kind of software defect you ask? Well what if a software defect misreports the position of the accelerator pedal? What if there is a botched redundancy pattern in electronic controls? What if flaky code turns on AP? Mistakes like this are in other production vehicles. Well, NHTSA exonerated 200+ Teslas earlier this year, right? Read the report. NHTSA DID NOT CONSIDER SOFTWARE DEFECTS at all in their investigation. If you don't even look, you won't

 I've worked on a number of pieces that are relevant to automated/autonomous vehicle (AV) regulations lately. Here is a resource page to organize the material all in one place. Round table discussion on AV ethics, safety, and trust  (good starting point for orientation to issues; should be no paywall despite being IEEE) Smerconish general audience piece on issues with AV industry public road testing  (both Tesla and rest of industry) Video of SiriusXM Radio interview : Michael Smerconish and Phil Koopman Five Principles for regulation of highly autonomous vehicles Keynote talk on autonomous vehicle safety engineering AV industry and trust SSRN Autonomous Vehicle Regulation and Trust  (detailed scholarly publication preprint for legal journal).  Several topics in this paper appear in shorter versions elsewhere on this list Autonomous Vehicle Myths: The Dirty Dozen  {AV policy myths, disinformation campaign} EE Times short version   Longer, more detailed version   Video talk on the d