The E.U.'s Data Driven Delusions of Driving Safety
The U.S. highway fatality rate is three times the overall average within the European Union.? While the U.S. Department of Transportation has mandated automatic emergency braking implementation on new cars by 2029, the E.U. has opted to focus on driver monitoring and, more recently, harebrained data sharing schemes from Euro NCAP (New Car Assessment Program) and the European Commission.
In essence, the U.S. has told car makers to design their vehicles in such a way that they stop colliding with other cars, inanimate objects, and pedestrians.? European regulators are telling car makers to connect to an unfunded data sharing platform with no proven life-saving efficacy.
Actually, the situation is even worse than that.? The proposed E.U. data sharing proposition – initiated more than 10 years ago – now comprises (at least) six separate organizations with regional affiliates, all seeking to fulfill an E.U. “Delegated Regulation 886” for creating “road safety-related minimum universal traffic information free of charge to users.”
As with all such E.U. actions, interested parties (i.e. member states) set out to fulfill the legislation identifying relevant road safety-related data elements.? The result drew in various organizations, data sets, and new standards.
The participating organizations include:
These organizations are now cooperating under the banner Safety-Related Traffic Information (SRTI) to improve harmonization of message sets for safety-related traffic info.
The standards created as part of this effort so far include:
The safety categories defined in the Delegated Act include:
The objective is that road infrastructure operators and transportation departments would collect data from sensors and cameras along roadsides and communicate the information via cellular-based cloud platforms or V2X roadside units.? A big challenge for regulators is the lack of confidence among auto makers in the quality, reliability, accuracy, and ubiquity of this data.
Under normal circumstances auto makers would never participate in such a data sharing scheme lacking, as it does, some acceptable validation processes.? An equivalent data platform in the U.S., the workzone data exchange (WZDx), has been shown to comprise nearly useless, outdated information. Rate of adoption by car companies? Zero.
The fundamental flaw in this E.U. driven approach has been its focus on the intelligent transportation system (ITS) community comprising organizations primarily focused on road infrastructure.? Historically, these organizations have had limited contact with the automotive industry, (strange though that may seem).
More importantly, the ITS community has generally focused on Wi-Fi-based wireless communications such as dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) or, as it is described in Europe “ITS-G5.”? This defunct V2X protocol, largely superseded globally by cellular-based C-V2X technology, has been almost universally rejected in the vehicle world, with the possible exception of commercial vehicles, everywhere but Europe, where enthusiasm for DSRC/ITS-G5 remains strong.
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In fact, Euro NCAP, mentioned earlier, is allocating additional scoring points for in-vehicle alerting platforms that use both V2X and cellular cloud sources.? Once again, European regulators are putting their thumb on the scale for DSRC.?
The driver alerts prioritized by Euro NCAP almost precisely match the categories defined by the EC Delegated Act:
There are existing commercial cloud-based alerting services – such as Haas Alert and Bosch – that already address many of these use cases.? Waze, too, captures similar information but in a user-generated manner that requires validation. Remember, though, these are only alerts which means they are dependent upon driver action to be useful.
For their part, auto makers in Europe have stood up their own data exchange under the aegis of the VDA (German Association of the Automotive Industry).? Called ADAXO, the VDA-created data exchange is intended to fulfill a similar objective to the Safety-Related Traffic Information (SRTI - more acronyms, please!) agenda, with an emphasis on data extracted from vehicles into a secure data exchange enabling everything from enhanced safety to revenue-generating business proposition while preserving GDPR principles.
The ADAXO concerns vis-à-vis E.U. regulatory inputs are summarized in a white paper:
“The introductory remarks illustrate the regulatory density and the associated requirements complexity that directly – and also negatively – influence the innovative capability of the automotive sector. So far, hardly any synergies or interconnections between the regulatory projects are evident. In addition, individual directorates-general of the EU Commission have commissioned studies that describe the requirements with respect to access to vehicle data and propose very detailed solutions. There should be better coordination of the projects of the various directorates-general. Furthermore, the parallel and largely decoupled approach within the framework of the European legislative initiatives overlooks the existing and practice-tested concepts and initiatives of the OEMs with respect to the derivation of vehicle data within the context of access to in-vehicle data.”
All of this does not even address the efficacy of in-vehicle user interfaces.? The timing and nature of alerts and their termination.? Also, expected driver reactions.
Regulators in Europe are pushing to “encourage” or eventually force auto makers to enable in-vehicle alerts based on the safety-related data being compiled and, some day, transmitted via cellular and/or roadside V2X devices.? The VDA/ADAXO effort at least defines a path to monetization of such a data exchange which would include non-safety-related data.
The E.U. already mandates wireless connectivity in cars thanks to eCall.? It makes sense to use this channel for communications that might prevent crashes instead of simply responding to crashes.? The only reasonable path to implementation likely lies through VDA/ADAXO.? That being said, car companies are not excited about the prospect of freely exchanging data.? One should not look for any significant progress any time soon. European Commission be damned.
VDA – ADAXO – Automotive Data Access: Extended and Open - https://www.vda.de/dam/jcr:72f7590f-cd77-4e8c-b8dd-d34df3c483f9/VDA_5690_Positionspapier_ADAXO_EN_RZ.pdf?mode=view
Euro NCAP – Safe Driving Vehicle Assistance Protocol - file:///C:/strategianow/ncap/euro-ncap-protocol-safe-driving-vehicle-assistance-v09.pdf
DFRS – Data for Road Safety - https://dataforroadsafety.eu/
EU Lobbyist & ardent pedestrian
2 个月???? C-ITS works as a sharing mechanism, probably because automotive are not driving it. ?? OEM bicker too much, maybe better to have them on the backseat this time. Automotive OEM never agree in anything, do they have the governance for data sharing?
Vice President Of Marketing And Business Development at Autotalks
2 个月Very enlightening article It is not easy to explain the complexity of this puzzle, and you have made it very nicely, Roger. Thank you
Principal at Louis V. Lombardo LLC
2 个月Thanks Roger. And the dying continues…