Industrial safety-related considerations to introducing full autonomy in the automotive domain

Organizations in the automotive domain, which aim to transition into developing fully autonomous vehicles face many challenges. These range from organizational issues to engineering concerns. This paper builds on structured interviews with professionals from industry and academia to provide a deeper understanding of existing problems. Standards, safety analysis, legacy assumptions related to having a human driver, and increased complexity and complexity handling were raised as important concerns. The analysis of these concern leads us to consider the current relationship between academia and industry as too disconnected. There is a risk that new techniques developed by academia end up irrelevant to industry. This underlying problem, and others relevant to autonomy, might be solved by collaborative research between different automotive companies. However, there are experts that challenge the underlying need for such collaboration. Therefore, externally to automotive companies, new expert arenas might be required in order to facilitate an exchange of ideas that lead to new collaboration efforts. Internally to automotive companies, the changes brought on by autonomy will lead to organizational changes and the creation of new roles. These organizational changes will have to be managed, or otherwise unnecessary conflict might occur between new and old roles.QC 20180406