UK standard for self-driving car safety oversight

Update: March 31, 2021
UK standard for self-driving car safety oversight

It is the fourth publication from the CAV Standards Programme backed by CCAV, the government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, and delivered with the Department for Transport, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), Innovate UK and Zenzic.

The document is PAS 1882:2021 ‘Data collection and management for automated vehicle trials for the purpose of incident investigation – specification’, which “ensures consistency in information collection across trialling organisations and to improve safety across all trials being undertaken in the UK”, according to BSI. “The data collected by automated vehicles can provide a valuable source of information to support forensic or fact-finding investigation, key to gaining knowledge of safety issues and performing incident analysis that in-turn can build trust.”

It specifies requirements for the collection, curation, storage and sharing of information during automated vehicle trials – including information essential to the operation of the driving system, and information the system or trialling organisation might receive, generate or hold which is not directly used to operate the vehicle.

Also contained are recommendations for additional information that a trialling organisation should seek to collect.

“The deployment of CAM in the UK has the potential to make our everyday journeys greener, safer, easier and more reliable,” said David Webb, innovation head at CCAV. “However, they are safety-critical technologies, and we must do all we can to ensure that the deployments are as safe as possible. PAS 1882, with its focus on data collection and management to support incident investigations, is a key step in doing so.”

PAS 1882:2021 is available free from BSI, although your details are required.