(TND) — A nonprofit driving safety organization is putting "federal regulators on notice" over a lack of guardrails and data collection for vehicle automation systems.
Such systems are available in almost half of new cars, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Driver-assistance systems combine adaptive cruise control, lane-centering and various other features with the use of cameras, radar or other sensors to “see” the road and other vehicles, according to IIHS.
Then, there are the fully autonomous cars with no drivers, which aren’t available to the public.
David Kidd, an IIHS senior research scientist, posted something of an open letter this week to regulators, not long after a group of senators wrote to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration with a plea for the agency to “take firm control of the wheel and steer manufacturers towards prioritizing safety.”
Kidd said he saw the letter from the senators to the NHTSA as an opportunity for him and IIHS “to ring the bell again” over their safety concerns.
IIHS has been calling for safeguards with driver-assistance systems for years, he said.
"We haven't seen anything that indicates a safety problem," Kidd said. "We (also) haven't seen anything that indicates these systems improve safety. But they're growing in number. They're growing in complexity and like how much of driving they will automate. And so ... NHTSA needs to do something to make sure there's some sort of baseline of safety."IIHS has a similar mission to that of NHTSA but without the enforcement mechanism, Kidd said.
The features available to the public aren’t self-driving systems, and IIHS said the features can make driving more dangerous if they give the driver a false sense of security.
They’re convenience features, though the public may think they’re more than that, IIHS said.
IIHS President David Harkey told The National Desk in March that his group was trying to fill a regulatory gap when it began testing driver-assistance systems about a year ago.
The IIHS report released earlier this year found just one of 14 driver-assistance systems earned an acceptable rating.
No partial driving automation system earned an overall good rating from IIHS.
The best-performing system was the Lexus Teammate with Advanced Drive that is available on the 2022-24 Lexus LS.
Two other systems earned overall marginal scores, and the other 11 rated poorly. Some individual criteria, however, did fine even within the lower-rated systems.
NHTSA has yet to issue any regulations to ensure driving automation systems are safe, Kidd said.
IIHS has some “simple” suggestions, he said.
A driver should be required to wear their seat belt and have automatic emergency braking and lane departure prevention turned on for the partial driving automation systems to operate.
And he said there should be cameras and sensors in the car to ensure drivers stay engaged – eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.
“There are some pretty basic things that federal regulators could require to make these systems safer,” Kidd said.
They’re also concerned over what they believe is a lack of data around driving automation systems and crashes.
Data is crucial to allowing folks like himself to evaluate the safety of these systems.
There are data reporting requirements in some cases, but there’s duplication and variance in the reporting, he said.
And reports can be incomplete.
Kidd said he’d like to see the NHTSA create a repository of vehicle identification numbers with features that researchers could cross-check with insurance claims and crash reports.
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