Risk Assessment of Autonomous Driving: Integrating Technical Failures, Ethical Dilemmas, and Policy Frameworks

2026-06-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the emerging risks confronting autonomous driving—namely technological failures, ethical dilemmas, and fragmented regulation—even as it promises to reduce human-caused accidents. Integrating technical, ethical, and policy dimensions, this work proposes a novel, systematically linked risk assessment framework. Drawing on NHTSA crash data, California DMV disengagement reports, the MIT Moral Machine experiment, and comparative regulatory analyses across five jurisdictions, the research employs multi-source data fusion, comparative policy analysis, and ethical framework mapping. It identifies perception and classification errors as the predominant forms of technical failure, reveals how divergent ethical preferences and regulatory disparities constrain large-scale deployment, and advances a synergistic governance pathway that harmonizes engineering standards, ethical consensus, and adaptive institutional regulation.

Abstract

Autonomous driving technology has the potential to reduce the large number of road traffic accidents caused by human error each year, but it also brings new types of risks that need to be evaluated from the aspects of technology, ethics and regulations. Based on public crash data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), disengagement reports from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the MIT Moral Machines dataset, and a comparative regulatory analysis of five jurisdictions, we have found that the main types of technical failure modes are perception and classification errors. These account for a relatively large proportion of the reported accidents, and it can be concluded that there are different ethical frameworks for autonomous vehicle decision-making, and inconsistent regulations in different areas increase the uncertainty of widespread application. Generally speaking, the problems of technology, ethics and regulation are closely related and need to be solved together. Therefore, this paper recommends a more adaptive and cooperative governance approach that combines engineering standards, ethical discussion, and institutional supervision.

Problem

• autonomous driving
• risk assessment
• technical failures
• ethical dilemmas
• policy frameworks

Innovation

• risk assessment
• autonomous driving
• ethical dilemmas
• regulatory frameworks
• technical failures