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arXiv · 2610.08458

Behavioral Safety Assessment towards Large-scale Deployment of Autonomous Vehicles, Part II: Assessment Results

Henry X. Liu·Tinghan Wang·Xintao Yan·Haowei Sun·Zhijie Qiao·Kenneth Boyd·Shuo Feng·Greg Stevens·Greg McGuire
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Abstract

Third-party evaluations of autonomous vehicle (AV) safety can play a vital role in improving public acceptance, building consumer confidence, and establishing effective safety standards. In Part I of this study, we propose a dedicated third-party testing initiative for systematically evaluating AV behavioral safety. In this paper, we validate our proposed framework using Autoware.Universe, an open-source Level 4 Automated Driving System (ADS), tested both in simulated environments and on the physical test track at the University of Michigan's Mcity Testing Facility. The results indicate that Autoware.Universe possesses 6 out of 14 behavioral competencies and exhibited a crash rate of 3.01x10^-3 crashes per mile, approximately 1,000 times higher than the average human driver crash rate. During the tests, we also uncovered a number of unknown unsafe scenarios for Autoware.Universe. These findings underscore the necessity of behavioral safety evaluations for improving AV safety performance prior to widespread public deployment.

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Henry X. Liu, Tinghan Wang, Xintao Yan, Haowei Sun, Zhijie Qiao, Kenneth Boyd, Shuo Feng, Greg Stevens, Greg McGuire. 2026-10-06. Behavioral Safety Assessment towards Large-scale Deployment of Autonomous Vehicles, Part II: Assessment Results. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08458

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