Causal Analysis of the delayed Roll-out of Fully Autonomous Vehicles

Based on the authors’ experience of developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) and the surrounding on-demand mobility service at NEVS and numerous discussions with industry experts, the main reasons are:

• Firstly, the overall complexity of the problem and the many interdependencies between different and often otherwise unrelated disciplines which often leads to development in one discipline being hindered by obstacles in other disciplines or areas of expertise.
• Secondly, the fact that there’s no purpose-built AV available today that has both a design optimized for ridesharing and the technical maturity for AD technology to unfold its full potential. In this case, technical maturity refers both to fulfilling functional safety requirements and readiness for serial production.

This report aims to, with a special emphasis on purpose-built AVs, analyze and explain technical, commercial, and regulatory challenges around automated driving and provides suggestions on how to overcome those. Since many challenges are interdisciplinary in their nature and advancements in one discipline are often hindered by obstacles in other disciplines, this report is intended to give a broad overview and general understanding of as many AV related aspects as possible and to make interdependencies between different areas visible. If you are an expert in one AV related discipline, it’s not the authors’ ambition to teach you anything new in your specific area of expertise, but for some of the other disciplines they hope the report can provide you with new insights and guidance that will prove valuable for your own work.