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arXiv · 2606.00191

Safe2Drive: Evaluating Safe Driving Behaviors of E2E Autonomous Driving Models

Nishad Sahu·Kalpana Panda·Congyuan Yu·Changzhong Qian·Shounak Sural·Ragunathan Rajkumar
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Abstract

Recent end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving policies achieve high driving scores in closed-loop simulations. Yet it remains unclear whether these policies handle common safety-critical scenarios. We present Safe2Drive (S2D), a set of Bench2Drive-aligned scenario extensions focused on three frequent families of road hazards: work zones, pedestrian jaywalking, and occluded vulnerable road users (VRUs). Safe2Drive adds 100 common but challenging scenarios and introduces SafeDriving Score (SDS), a safety-centric metric that augments prior evaluators with pre-crash braking, work zone-object contact, lane centering, and smoothness checks. Evaluating two state-of-the-art policies (LEAD and SimLingo) on S2D, we find that their driving scores drop sharply relative to their reported Bench2Drive baselines (LEAD: from 94.70 DS on Bench2Drive to 39.95 DS on S2D; SimLingo: from 85.07 DS on Bench2Drive to 41.00 DS on S2D) and that SDS on S2D is low (11.85 for LEAD and 15.27 for Sim-Lingo). These results are consistent with brittle safe-driving behaviors such as poor work-zone understanding, red-light violations, and late or absent braking for pedestrians. This study highlights a lack of safe behavioral reasoning in E2E models even when tested on CARLA towns that are part of the training set. We plan to release the code and videos for all 100 S2D scenarios.

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Nishad Sahu, Kalpana Panda, Congyuan Yu, Changzhong Qian, Shounak Sural, Ragunathan Rajkumar. 2026-05-29. Safe2Drive: Evaluating Safe Driving Behaviors of E2E Autonomous Driving Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00191

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