A lack of meaningful human control for automated vehicles: pressing issues for deployment and regulation
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The introduction of automated driving systems (ADS) presents significant regulatory and operational challenges to ensure safe and responsible deployment in mixed traffic environments. Despite much academic work and efforts of practitioners, these challenges remain open, requiring a transdisciplinary integration of perspectives. This paper draws on insights from a recent transdisciplinary workshop, highlighting the key issues in ADS deployment, including misalignment between regulations and system capabilities, emerging accident types, and gaps in driver understanding and training. Current regulations struggle to keep pace with the advancing capabilities of ADS, resulting in unclear accountability frameworks and inadequate safety measures. The concept of meaningful human control was used as a basis to identify issues. Workshop participants agreed that meaningful human control has an essential role to play to address the identified issues by ensuring that humans can adequately interact with ADS and that ADS are designed in a manner that ensures safe and responsible deployment with clear fail-safes and redundancy mechanisms. The paper advocates for meaningful human control through continuous driver and vehicle assessment, dynamic safety certifications, and stronger communication between regulators and manufacturers to ensure safe and responsible design, regulation and deployment of automated vehicles. Implementing these actions will strengthen ADS regulation and help navigate the ethical and operational complexities of automated driving systems.
Authors: Simeon C. Calvert, Arkady Zgonnikov
Institution: Delft University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,353
Funder: Technische Universiteit Delft
OpenAlex ID: W4407343813