Safe Drive Initiative The Autonomous Vehicle Governance Ecosystem: A Guide for Decision-Makers
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The conventional automotive industry is a mature,
highly regulated, consolidated global business
environment, which was conventionally accustomed
to lengthy processes of product development
and engineering developed and refined through
the 20th century. However, with the advent of
connectivity, electrification, automated driving and
shared mobility, these titans of industry have been
forced to become agile, fast-moving organizations
as driven by the race to deliver the connected,
autonomous vehicles (AVs) of the future.
The automotive industry, being so established, has
developed alongside a substantial ecosystem of
technical bodies to develop international, regional
and national standards to enable conformity, safety
and harmonization of engineering efforts across
markets. With the AV sector emerging so rapidly, the
international standards bodies’ lengthy process of
standards development is being tested as industry
and policy-makers consider their future needs for
assessing the safety of automated vehicles.
This has given rise to a rapidly growing ecosystem
of industry alliances and consortia, as industry
stakeholders come together to co-create guidance,
technical solutions and other tools in the absence
of suitable standards – although many of these
activities are intended to precede and evolve
into technical standards themselves, or provide
supplementary technical knowledge to accompany
standards.
These alliances and consortia are typically formed
to address a specific industry need, and hence
are often focused on a singular domain, topic or
common purpose. With an ever-increasing
number of alliances and consortia forming, it
becomes difficult for industry decision-makers to
map the ecosystem, decide where to participate,
or how to utilize the know-how produced from
these consortia.
The reason for this is twofold. First, these consortia
typically work independently of one another, with
little alignment on common goals across groups.
Second, there is a lack of a “single picture”
summarizing the focus of these consortia.
The purpose of this white paper is to provide a
landscape of relevant industry alliances, consortia
and other groups, while also highlighting the
activities of key standards bodies, to provide
guidance to decision-makers from industry, as well
as other stakeholders from the public sector about
these activities.