Research Report
Unsettled Issues Concerning Semi-Automated Vehicles: Safety and Human Interactions on the Road to Full Autonomy
2020-02-28
EPR2020001
Across the span of the SAE International-defined Levels of Driving Automation, human drivers occupy a diverse range of responsibilities and authority on the vehicle movement and the monitoring of the outside environment. From both a technological and a regulatory perspective, there is a gap that divides lower levels of automation (L1 through L3) and higher levels of automation (L4 and L5). For those vehicles that require the cooperation between a human driver and the autonomous technology, it is important to ascertain the safety consequences of such a design choice. It is also important to understand what the transition between automated driving and manual driving entails for the human driver, as well as for the surrounding traffic.