AV Testers Confuse Quantity With Quality
AV technology testing is wrongly obsessing on number of miles driven instead of quality research.
That’s the opinion of autonomous vehicle safety specialists Foretellix which calls for a sea-change in attitudes among AV players in the industry such as Waymo who trumpet their millions of miles driven on public roads. CEO Ziv Binyamini, said: “You have to ask yourself, what exactly have they tested when they drive? I mean, they may have just driven in circles, doing the same thing again and again. So the question is: what kind of situations or scenarios have they actually tested? Did they look at all of the possible scenarios, to make sure that they’ve actually tested the car in all possible situations, or they don’t run into a situation where the car is not able to respond properly?”
Binyamini said all four key areas of testing, on the road, simulations, vehicle-in-the-loop, and test tracks, need to be used to ensure the safety of the technology. Yet simulations have some distinct advantages, he said: “We have to do actual physical testing, because it’s the only real thing. But you can’t really test all of the millions of variants of scenarios on the physical platform, and some of them are very, very dangerous – it’s immoral to try them. So the only way to test all of the variants is in simulations.”
