An Overview of Autonomous Vehicles Safety

The new world of autonomous vehicles is posing many challenges to automotive safety. This paper at first describes the status of the ISO 26262 functional safety standard, with specific focus on its application to semiconductors. Then the paper proposes a way to analyze the reliability of a functional safety component, taking into account its safety goal. After that, the paper describes why functional safety and reliability are necessary but not sufficient for AVs: they need to be combined with security, with safety of intended functionality and ultimately with a "responsibility sensitive safety", in order to provide the overall level of trust that the community is expecting from autonomous vehicles.