S.E.R.G. WP Series #11-2025: Critical safety risks for passengers onboard level 4 automated shuttles in Europe: mitigation strategies and public policy implications

2025 - Wale Arowolo, Evangelia Gaitanidou and Isabelle Nicolai

A core value proposition of driverless automated vehicles (AVs) is reducing road accidents largely attributed to human errors and increasing traffic safety. Nonetheless, safety remains a foremost concern in the adoption of AVs. This paper enriches the academic and policy debate on driverless (level 4) AV safety for onboard passengers. We conduct semi-structured interviews with 47 Connected Cooperative Automated Mobility (CCAM) experts from diverse sectors and 11 European countries for insights into their views and opinions on the critical safety issues of driverless AV and possible mitigation strategies in Europe. Then, we conduct data analysis using reflexive thematic analysis. We find that the critical safety issues are injury, accident or death of passengers, adverse weather/environmental conditions, cybersecurity issues, perceived safety risks, and AV functional failure. We argue that the safety risks at specific locations in the extant literature are interlinked and are generalisable in the European context. The key mitigation strategies are monitoring in-vehicle conditions, designing AVs for functional safety, increasing road testing to improve AV perception and sensing technologies, user education and communication about AV, support from road infrastructure and V2X technologies. The other mitigation strategies are facilitating stakeholder collaboration, knowledge, and data sharing, enacting/enforcing safety standards and regulations, and separating AVs from human drivers. Then, we analyse the mitigation strategies using five governance policy steering instruments to understand workable public policy approaches to support policymaking on driverless (level 4) AV in Europe. We argue that a combination of governing by enabling and governing by authority policy steering instruments could support mitigating the critical safety risks of level 4 AVs. We argue that these policy steering instruments could support mitigating the critical safety risks of level 4 AVs and play a key role in supporting driverless AVs' safe integration into transportation systems and the transition to a connected, cooperative, automated mobility future in Europe.