400 million test cases: industry must grasp the scale of the AV challenge

Optimising autonomous vehicle (AV) validation is a puzzle that automotive industry companies are yet to crack: that’s according to Jeff Rupp, Chief Technical Officer at The American Center for Mobility. Leading a panel at Automotive World’s M:bility | Detroit, he was joined by David Agnew, Vice President Business Development at Dataspeed, who referenced research published by the Rand Corporation in 2016. It argued that fatal incidents occur on US roads one in every 100 million miles (160,934,400km) driven, and that to reach human levels of reliability, AVs would need to reach 275 million miles without a fatality. This number, said Agnew, is something the industry needs to take seriously.