Final Report of the Intelligent Vehicle Dependability and Security (IVDS) Project

The IVDS project vision has been the realization of highly dependable and secure operation of intelligent vehicles, verified and validated with respect to strict dependability (particularly safety) and security requirements by rigorous state-of-the-art methods.

Principal findings of the project, conducted over the past four plus years, point to significant shortfalls in technologies, cost, governance, and societal aspects in achieving the end goal of safe and secure SAE Level 4 or 5 self-driving intelligent vehicles.

Going forward, it is evident that the paradigm of “moving fast and breaking things” is not the right approach to replace human-driven vehicles with autonomous vehicles, just as it wasn’t for aviation at the dawn of the jet age. Had it been, with no quantitative safety standards, no Federal Aviation Administration or its global counterparts to oversee safety of airliners, airplane manufacturers and airlines would have been allowed to offer commercial air services without certification. They might have adopted “move fast and learn”, resulting in unnecessary crashes and loss of innocent passenger life. We would never have reached the state today where 10+ million flights transport over 700 million passengers yearly in the US with an exemplary safety record of no fatalities in the last 15 years.

A path exists to realize the end-state of road transport that is just as safe as aviation, if we learn the lessons from aviation community in how to design, build, test, validate, operate and regulate safety-critical systems.

The full report can be found at https://ivds.dependability.org/docs/IFIP WG10.4 IVDS Final Report.pdf.