Safety Promise and Challenge of Automotive Electronics. Insights from Unintended Acceleration

摘要

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) requested this National Research Council (NRC) study of how the agency's regulatory, research, and defect investigation programs can be strengthened to meet the safety assurance and oversight challenges arising from the expanding functionality and use of automotive electronics. To conduct the study, the NRC appointed a 16-member committee of experts tasked with considering NHTSA's recent experience in responding to concerns over the potential for faulty electronics to cause the unintentional vehicle acceleration as reported by some drivers. The subject matter of the committee's findings is summarized in Box S-1 and provided in full at the end of each chapter. These findings indicate how the electronics systems being added to automobiles present many opportunities for making driving safer but at the same time present new demands for ensuring the safe performance of increasingly capable and complex vehicle technologies. These safety assurance demands pertain both to the automotive industry's development and deployment of electronics systems and to NHTSA's fulfillment of its safety oversight role. With regard to the latter, the committee recommends that NHTSA give explicit consideration to the oversight challenges arising from automotive electronics and that the agency develop and articulate a long-term strategy for meeting the challenges. A successful strategy will reduce the chances of a recurrence of the kind of controversy that drove NHTSA's response to questions about electronics causing unintended acceleration.