The autonomous future will be safer, but public awareness is essential

The National Transport Safety Board’s (NTSB) preliminary investigation in to the March 2018 self-driving Uber crash revealed that in the interest of preventing erratic behaviour, such as sudden stops and lane changes, Uber’s self-driving system was built to disable the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) fitted to the Volvo XC90 when in self-driving mode. These included a collision avoidance function with automatic emergency braking (AEB), as well as functions for detecting driver alertness and road sign information.