Cruise, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute present groundbreaking study establishing a human driving safety benchmark

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Sep 27, 2023, 12:24 ET

Two-year study focuses on driving behavior of ridehail drivers in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Cruise and The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, one of the leading transportation research institutes in the country, partnered to create a human benchmark to be used in measuring safety performance of autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. This research, conducted in collaboration with General Motors and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), offers a nuanced safety performance measure to use for Cruise's driverless fleet.

This study allows us to be more precise about the statistics originally released in our 1 million mile report. Compared to the ridehail drivers in the study, Cruise estimates that its AVs were involved in:

65% fewer collisions overall
94% fewer collisions as the primary contributor
74% fewer collisions with meaningful risk of injury

The study was conducted over a two year period, which observed 5.6 million miles of human ridehail driving data in the city of San Francisco, excluding select high speed roads (e.g. posted speeds of greater than 35 mph). Based on the combined data collected from UMTRI's large-scale fleet study and VTTI's precision-instrument study, researchers were able to capture a robust measurement of the human ride hail crash rate.

"What's been missing in autonomous vehicle research is a benchmark that goes beyond the available data and accurately reflects the human driver. With support from General Motors and Cruise, experts at UMTRI were able to take a groundbreaking new approach to generating human-driver benchmarks in environments comparable to ADS deployments," said Dr. Carol Flannagan, lead author of the paper and research professor at UMTRI. "We investigated actual driving behaviors of ridehail drivers in a complex urban environment that can be meaningfully utilized as a benchmark for comparable human driver performance."

"This research provides authentic insights into the driving habits of human ridehail operators, and offers tremendous value in our quest to make our roads safer for all through the broad introduction of safe self-driving vehicles," said Louise Zhang, Cruise's Vice President of Safety & Systems. "Our gratitude extends to UMTRI and VTTI for their innovation and academic integrity. This study exemplifies Cruise's longstanding commitment to safety."

More information on this human benchmark study can be found here.

SOURCE Cruise LLC