Safety Standards for Autonomous Vehicles: Challenges and Way Forward.

This paper examines current autonomous vehicle (AV) safety standards and identifies gaps in their scope and depth. It is the first to present a thorough review and critique of such standards. It suggests that they lack the necessary guidance to ensure the safety of AVs, causing a bottleneck in transitioning from AV development to public adoption. Primary challenges of standards are presented, explicitly covering gaps and weaknesses pertaining to AVs' user-system interactions, operational design domains (ODDs), safety testing methods, safety metrics, acceptance criteria, and machine learning pit- falls across the lifecycle of AVs. A way forward to address these challenges is also proposed, emphasising the need to decomplexify the ecosystem of AV standards and promote stake-holder interdependence. The paper concludes by recognising the criticality of legislative and regulatory frameworks for AVs and advocates for cohering safety standards, certification, and regulation.