Assessment of the passenger’s safety in autonomous cars

Abstract

Nowadays we are facing the transition from human-driven vehicles to the higher levels of automated driving, where the driver's primary role does not have to be the driving as in its classical meaning. As the driving task would not be the primary, we can expect driver and all passengers to perform new activities while being in the vehicle. In this article we analyse results of four crash tests. One of them has a specific configuration, where the driver crash test dummy is set to the situation of the level four of the automated driving as if were carrying out some activity on the notebook. The research focuses moreover on free objects and the risks that they represent during the accident for passengers. The results of all four tests are mutually compared and discussed to get the idea how the unusual driver position including working activity could influence the impacts on human passengers. Other three configurations represent standard lateral crash test, frontal impact into the rigid barrier and the crash of the motorcycle. The results measured on the rider show extreme situation to which we can compare absolute values of drivers from the rest of analysed crash test. In the assessment we follow the parameters linked to the acting vehicles and of course parameters describing the impacts on drivers.