Philip Koopman
Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.
Philip Koopman did not write this page. What is this?
It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
Blog Safe Autonomy His blog on autonomous-vehicle safety. Has a feed.
Open safeautonomy.blogspot.com
Recent
- Safety Architecture & Redundancy Patterns 30 Mar 2025 This is a lecture from my CMU graduate course on safety architecture and redundancy patterns. It describes numerous patterns that involve redundancy used for fault detection (fail silent), redundancy used for avai…
- Cyber-Hurricanes and Automotive Software: Common cause failures and the risk of widespread automotive losses 20 Jul 2024 The recent CrowdStrike IT outage has focused attention on a topic rarely discussed, but fundamental to mission-critical systems: common cause failures. While this particular outage affected business and airlines more th…
- Architectural Coupling Killed The Software Defined Vehicle 14 Jul 2024 SDV failures might have poor architectural cohesion and coupling as a critical factor. We’re reading about high profile software fiascos in car companies, and how they might be handling them, for example: The $5B VW bet…
Show 17 more
- Mercedes Benz DRIVE PILOT and driver blame 7 Jul 2024 MB has softened their stance on Level 3 liability, but they still don't really have your back when it matters. Good news: Mercedes Benz has improved their position on driver liability. Bad news: But they’re not there ye…
- Time to Formally Define Level 2+ Vehicle Automation 21 Jun 2024 We should formally define SAE Level 2+ to be a feature that includes not only Level 2 abilities but also the ability to change its travel path via intersections and/or interchanges. Level 2+ should be regulated in the s…
- Perspective on Waymo's Safety Progress 17 Jun 2024 I am frequently asked what I think of Waymo's progress on safety. Here are some thoughts on progress, mishaps, and whether we know they are acceptably safe. At current deployment rates it will take Waymo about 20…
- Truths & Myths About Automated Vehicle Safety -- Video Series 16 Jun 2024 The past year has seen both peak hype and significant issues for the automated vehicle industry. In this talk we recap general trends and summarize the current situation for autonomous vehicles such as robotaxis, as wel…
- The Waymo Utility Pole Crash 15 Jun 2024 Waymo vs. utility pole smackdown: the utility pole won. No apparent extenuating circumstances. Nobody was injured; the vehicle was empty. The pole suffered a minor dent but is still in service. This video has an intervi…
- Academic Publishing, AI, and Broken Incentives 15 Jun 2024 Since I've been a part of the academic publication ecosystem for decades (as have some of my readers), I'll share some thoughts on the latest publication quality scandals: Junior faculty are suffering from an ever-incre…
- SAE J3018 for operational safety 8 Jun 2024 Any company testing on public roads should conform to the industry standard for road testing safety: SAE J3018. When AV road testing first started, it was common for testers to claim that they were safe…
- Live Talk: Challenges in Autonomous Vehicle Safety Assessment 5 Jun 2024 Challenges in Autonomous Vehicle Safety Assessment Recorded live at a US DOT workshop on May 29, 2024. Knowing whether an autonomous vehicle is safe enough to operate on public roads is an extremely difficult challenge.…
- Waymo's Misleading Claim of Saving Lives 4 Jun 2024 Waymo claims they are "already saving lives" so often, and people are so taken in by that misleading claim, that I'm going to take a moment to explain why it is misleading. And especially harmful when used as justificat…
- Five views into the Cruise Robotaxi Pedestrian Dragging Mishap 3 Jun 2024 On October 2, 2023, a Cruise robotaxi dragged a woman 20 feet underneath the vehicle in San Francisco. The circumstances of the mishap and everything else are complex. But the robotaxi industry was profoundly shak…
- Video: Autonomous Vehicle Safety: More Than Net Risk (Live) 11 May 2024 Talk for EV Society of Canada, May 7, 2024 -- recorded as a live webinar Safety will ultimately be the deciding factor for the viability of autonomous vehicle technology. Despite various pronouncements and hype ov…
- New NHTSA high-speed/pedesterian AEB Rule 30 Apr 2024 NHTSA has a new rule out requiring high-capability Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) in new vehicles from 2029. Some key points from an initial read-through of the new NHTSA AEB Rule document are below. NHTSA points out…
- Proposed new definitions for safety (Draft) 25 Apr 2024 The following definitions were proposed at the recent Dagstuhl workshop and will be incorporated in an upcoming Safecomp paper. These below text is hereby placed in the public domain, with a specific objective of…
- When Is a Recall Not a Recall? 11 Mar 2024 This opinion piece claims that a Tesla software update should not be a recall. I'm calling bullsh*t. Article Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-believe-the-tesla-headlines-safety-recall-software-update-c2e95f…
- The Exponent Report on the Cruise Pedestrian Dragging Mishap 29 Jan 2024 On October 2, 2023, a Cruise robotaxi Autonomous Vehicle (AV) in San Francis-co struck and then later – as part of different maneuver – dragged a pedestrian under the vehicle as part of a more complex road mishap. …
- Cruise Pedestrian Dragging Incident Report 26 Jan 2024 Cruise has released materials from an investigation into the pedestrian dragging incident and related external communication transparency failures of last October. There is a lot to unpack, but remarkably little of it t…
- Vay deployment of tele-driven cars 20 Jan 2024 Vay is deploying tele-driven cars in Las Vegas. At a first pass they have done some safety homework, but open questions remain that they should address to instill public confidence. I spent some time doing background re…
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 13 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
At current ride volumes it would take a leading robotaxi fleet about twenty years without a single fatality to show it is as safe as the average human driver.
At current deployment rates it will take Waymo about 20 years with ZERO fatalities to show they are net as safe as average human driver fatality rates (including the old cars, impaired drivers, etc. in that comparison baseline).
Perspective on Waymo's Safety Progress Said 17 Jun 2024
Nobody has driven enough miles to show that robotaxis save lives, so the claim that they already do is not supported by the data.
But their latest study is for only 7.1 million miles. They need something like 40 times more data prove they are actually saving lives with statistical confidence (likely even more).
Waymo's Misleading Claim of Saving Lives Said 4 Jun 2024
The self-driving industry's strategy of answering criticism with 'we are saving lives' has failed, and it will have to change both how it deploys and how it talks.
At a higher level, the real event was a catastrophic failure of the industry's strategy of relentlessly shouting as loud as they can "Hey, get off our case, we're busy saving lives here!"
My Automated Vehicle Safety Prediction for 2024 Said 29 Dec 2023
Show 10 more
One company doing one ill-advised thing damages an entire emerging industry, which is why safety is a shared problem rather than a competitive one.
The Cruise debacle of the last few months proved (once again; remember Uber ATG?) that it only takes one company doing one ill-advised thing to hurt the entire industry.
My Automated Vehicle Safety Prediction for 2024 Said 29 Dec 2023
A carmaker's claim to be the safest is mostly an artefact of comparing a new car against a fleet average twelve years old.
Any true safety improvement for Tesla is good to have, but is much more likely due to comparison against an "average" vehicle (12 years old in the US) which is much less safe than any recent high-end vehicle regardless of manufacturer, and probably not driven on roads as safe on average as where Teslas are more popular.
Take Tesla safety claims with about a pound of salt Said 19 Dec 2023
Whatever safety gain a driver-assistance system delivers is cancelled out by the driver complacency it creates.
suggests that any steering automation safety gains (e.g., Level 2 autopilot) are approximately negated by driver complacency, with autopilot on being slightly worse than autopilot off
Take Tesla safety claims with about a pound of salt Said 19 Dec 2023
It is too early to know whether robotaxis are safer than human drivers where it counts, in fatal crashes.
It is too early to know whether current robotaxi technology is safer than human drivers for fatalities.
AV Safety and the False Dilemma Fallacy Said 16 Jul 2023
Automatic emergency braking is doing far more for road safety today than autonomous driving is, and it is left out of the argument.
Non-autonomous technology (AEB) is making far more of a contribution right now -- but is missing from the false dilemma.
AV Safety and the False Dilemma Fallacy Said 16 Jul 2023
The choice presented to the public, between human drivers who kill people and immature robotaxis, is a false dilemma that leaves out everything else that improves road safety.
They frame the situation as a choice between continued human drivers killing people (without statistical context) vs. immature robotaxis who don't drink and drive (but make other mistakes).
AV Safety and the False Dilemma Fallacy Said 16 Jul 2023
A self-driving car should be roughly ten times safer than a human driver before it is deployed, to leave engineering margin for what nobody can predict.
Taken together, there is an argument to be made that AVs should be safer than human drivers by about a factor of 10 (being a nice round order of magnitude number) to leave engineering margin for the above considerations.
The case for AVs being 10 to 100 times safer than human drivers Said 8 Jan 2023
Miles driven measures how well funded a self-driving company is, not how safe it is or how far ahead.
But having a ton of miles doesn’t mean you’re ahead, it just means you’re well-funded and you’re out there operating.
Number of miles as a self-driving car progress and safety metric (Metrics Episode 1) Said 25 Nov 2020
Every mile of public-road testing adds risk, so each one has to earn its keep.
Even if you have the best possible safety drivers, every test mile adds some risk. Hopefully that risk is no worse than human driver vehicle risks, but that’s a different discussion.
Number of miles as a self-driving car progress and safety metric (Metrics Episode 1) Said 25 Nov 2020
Nobody can drive the billions of representative miles that would prove a self-driving system safe before deploying it, so deployment always precedes proof.
But nobody will ever get to the billions of representative miles necessary to say anything compelling about expected safety until after they actually deploy their fleet.
Number of miles as a self-driving car progress and safety metric (Metrics Episode 1) Said 25 Nov 2020
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
30 March 2025
20 July 2024
14 July 2024
7 July 2024
21 June 2024
17 June 2024
-
Their words
At current deployment rates it will take Waymo about 20 years with ZERO fatalities to show they are net as safe as average human driver fatality rates (including the old cars, impaired drivers, etc. in that comparison baseline).
Perspective on Waymo's Safety Progresssafeautonomy.blogspot.com
16 June 2024
15 June 2024
8 June 2024
5 June 2024
4 June 2024
-
Their words
But their latest study is for only 7.1 million miles. They need something like 40 times more data prove they are actually saving lives with statistical confidence (likely even more).
Waymo's Misleading Claim of Saving Livessafeautonomy.blogspot.com
3 June 2024
11 May 2024
30 April 2024
25 April 2024
11 March 2024
29 January 2024
26 January 2024
20 January 2024
Nothing matches.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.