Safety on Italian Highways: Impacts of the Highway Chauffeur system

Road safety is certainly a main drive toward automated driving. Removing the human factor from driving maneuvers allows to prevent crashes caused or fostered by human flaws, such as distraction or tiredness. However, full automation on public roads is still a goal to be achieved, and different solutions are currently being developed. In the short term, one of the most promising examples is the Highway Chauffeur system, capable of performing fully automated driving in defined conditions and environments. The scope of this paper is to evaluate the number of crashes that could possibly be addressed through a defined market penetration of Highway Chauffeur vehicles (HC vehicles in the article). The evaluation is based on a bibliographical review and on an analysis of crash-related data recorded in Italy by the National Statistical Institute—ISTAT—on public roads. By using the information publicly available on ISTAT’s website, this paper provides a first magnitude concerning the number of crashes addressable by the Highway Chauffeur system, and final considerations on the future research to be carried out