Why functional safety experts worry about automotive systems having increasing autonomy

There is a growing interest by the public, policy makers and technologists in vehicles having highly automated systems, and ultimately autonomy. However, there is an apparent gap between where the automotive industry wants to go, and where its approach to safety assurance has come from, e.g. where the human driver is often treated as a primary risk control of hazardous events. In this paper, we explore this gap and report on the outcomes of a workshop, involving automotive functional safety engineers, that examined, empirically, some of the safety concerns that these safety engineers have around assuring the safety of highly-automated driving. Given the high degree of interactive complexity emerging from highly automated systems, the workshop data highlighted the need for a new safety concept and a new risk model and changes to the current legal and standards landscape.