We held our AEB Workshop in Detroit on April 9th/10th. Around 85 people from OEMs, Tier1’s and technology suppliers attended. There is a brief summary in the newsletter, below, and a separate special report that we published on the DVN website for members that covers this in more detail.
Waymo has now driven more than 50M driverless miles and its cars have been involved in roughly 60 crashes (since 2020), but most of them were the fault of other vehicles. The most serious crashes involved other drivers speeding and hitting the cars while stopped at red lights. Since last July, Waymo was involved in roughly 38 crashes, of which 3 may have been the fault of the Waymo car – in one case the Waymo hit a plastic crate, pushing it into the other lane causing a motorcycle to crash and in the other cases vehicles moved into Waymo’s travel lane causing it to brake but not in time to avoid hitting the vehicle. Overall, the reduction in airbag deployed crashes was around 80% compared to human drivers and insurance claims are 90% lower. Robotaxis will be involved in crashes, but the industry needs to publish data showing these sorts of statistics to inspire consumer confidence.
NHSTA rolled out a new AV Framework at the end of April which replaces the current patchwork of state laws aimed to make it easier to deploy robotaxis on public roads and streamlines crash reporting requirements with the changes taking effect on June 16th. These changes should accelerate L3 and Robotaxi deployments in the US market.
DVN will be co-hosting the EAC conference in China with Enmore in June which will include tracks on ADAS and Lidar. More details are on the website. If you are interested to speak and exhibit at our November conference in Germany, please reach out as soon as possible as we expect this to be a sold out event
Thank you,
Martin Booth
DVN USA Representative
[email protected]