Toyota’s take on self driving car safety issues

By: Richard Ding

Since the inception of the self driving car, safety has been one of the most widely talked about topics — how can we trust autonomous vehicles? Indeed, much of the conversation on that topic has been very well documented, and industry experts tend to agree that while there may be some safety blips, a self driving car is going to be many times safer than a human driver.

Jason Hallman, Principal Engineer for Safety and Crashworthiness at Toyota, offers another angle to the argument. Rather than looking at whether we can trust cars to be safe, he suggests that in the event of an accident, drivers and passengers might not brace for impact in the same way that they might in a regular car. Since they no longer need to focus on the road, their posture may be different and they might not even be facing the same way, which really changes how automakers are going to have to build a car’s safety features.

Toyota conducted a study to determine how people may position themselves, but the results were highly variable. The conclusion they reached was that they needed to conduct much more research into this area of autonomous vehicle safety, in order to better design safety features for self driving cars.

Read more about this unique safety concern posed in this article: http://www.autonews.com/article/20180826/MOBILITY/180829814/autonomous-toyota-safety-ann-arbor