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Driverless Transportation
Stacked technical paper on a dark surface under raking light, one sheet offset

Library

Autonomous vehicle research reports: a free library of papers and studies

Autonomous vehicle research papers on automated and connected road transport, organised by subject, with the primary documents hosted where they have always lived.

Hosted papers
2
Subject areas
5
Earliest
2013
Access
Free

Hosted

Papers hosted in this library

Two autonomous vehicle research reports are served directly, as the original PDFs, at their original paths.

Both autonomous vehicle research papers come out of the same programme at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, and both have had a longer half-life than almost anything else published on automated driving in that period. The road-safety paper is the more frequently cited of the two, largely because it made an argument that ran against the prevailing optimism: that a self-driving vehicle safer than the average human driver does not automatically produce safer roads while both are sharing them, because the failure modes of the mixed fleet are not the sum of the failure modes of its parts.

The household-demand paper is the quieter one and has aged in a more complicated way. Its arithmetic — that a household able to have a single vehicle reposition itself between trips could reduce its fleet substantially — was sound, and it became the analytical backbone of a great deal of subsequent argument about urban car ownership. What it could not anticipate was that the vehicles would arrive first as a metered service in a handful of metropolitan areas rather than as private property, which changes the ownership question entirely.

Subjects

Autonomous vehicle research reports by subject area

Why the free-access rule matters for research reports

The original selection criterion for autonomous vehicle research reports was that material had to be free to read, or at most require an email address, and it has been kept deliberately. Most of the genuinely load-bearing work on automated driving is published by government bodies, regulators and university institutes, and is public by obligation. Paywalled industry forecasts add remarkably little to it while costing a great deal, and they are systematically more optimistic than the peer-reviewed literature on the same questions.

Reading the 2015 literature now

The autonomous vehicle research papers from this period are worth reading against outcomes rather than for prediction. The safety argument has held up well: mixed automated and human traffic does produce failure modes belonging to neither, and every operator that reached genuine driverless service did so by bounding its operating domain rather than solving general driving. The demand and adoption forecasts have not held up, and the interesting part is how they failed — not by predicting the wrong year, but by assuming automation would arrive as a feature of privately owned vehicles rather than as a metered service in a handful of metropolitan areas.

Organisations publishing autonomous vehicle research reports in these areas — research institutes, government bodies, universities and standards groups — are indexed in the organisation directory.

Reference

About the library

Are the hosted reports the original files?
Yes. Both UMTRI papers are served as the original PDFs at the paths they have occupied since 2015. Those specific URLs are cited in published academic and trade work, so moving them would break citations that have been resolving for a decade.

What is included in the library?
Public research on automated and connected vehicles: government and regulator publications, university research institute papers, standards work and substantial industry studies. The original selection criterion was that material had to be free to read, or at most require an email address, and that has been kept.

Who wrote the two UMTRI reports?
Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. They produced a sustained series on automated-vehicle safety and demand between 2014 and 2018 that remains among the most-cited work in the field.