1st ICAI 2020

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2020

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

even cease to exist, or be restricted to trunk lines with high travel demand. With the massification of smartphones and the existence of autonomous vehicles, it is possible to imagine that there will be more and more vehicles of the “capacity” type, with varied capacities (5, 10, 15 passengers) and that, instead of going through a pre- defined, they will search for passengers through some type of mobile device application, similarly to what is currently used by Uber. 3.2 Road Safety Regarding road safety, it can be said that the increasing levels of vehicle automation are very welcome. In fact, human error is the primary factor in the occurrence of traffic accidents NHTSA. (2015). Thus, even technologies that only lead to partial levels of automation have already been responsible for a very positive impact in reducing accidents. Just to stay in the case of the afore mentioned ESP (level 1 automation technology), it is estimated (Sferco et al. (2001) that this technology is capable of reducing the damage, or preventing the accident, in 18% of the total occurrences with victims, and in 34% of those with fatal victims. However, it is necessary to differentiate, however, the long-term scenario, in which completely autonomous vehicles (even at level 3) will be the overwhelming majority on the roads and will interact with each other and with their surroundings in a logical, fast, predictable and precise way. transition scenario, in which vehicles increasingly automated (and programmed to strictly comply with traffic laws) will interact with vehicles with little or no automation, basically guided by their drivers (Kunstler, 1993). In the first case, it is possible to predict a drastic reduction in the number of accidents, both by eliminating the human error component, as well as by prior knowledge of the route layout (there will not be “unexpected” curves, for example), by the greater capacity and fluidity of communication intervehicle (intervehicle communication opens up numerous possibilities for reducing accidents. Even at the simplest levels, it will work similarly to an aviation transponder, that is, vehicles announce to each other their basic data of speed, location and direction, which avoids accidents caused by “blind spots”. At more sophisticated levels, vehicles can even share potential dangers on the track, such as accidents or loose animals), of vehicles with the infrastructure of the road (As in the previous item, there are numerous possibilities that can be explored in this field. From the simplest how to inform the maximum speed allowed, to more sophisticated information such as the existence of obstacles to free movement, such as works or events), and also for the enormous potential for detecting the surrounding variables, represented by the use of thermal cameras and radars, among other detection systems (It can be argued that such resources are also available to human drivers, but it must be argued that people have a limited capacity for attention and analysis of these resources, a limitation that obviously does not affect vehicle automation systems, which can analyze them in a hierarchical manner according to rules previously established by their programmers). A different situation must occur in the transition phase in which fully autonomous vehicles of levels 3 and 4 will share public roads with a large number of vehicles still

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