This morning, a coalition of 11 companies — Aptiv, Audi, Baidu, BMW, Continental, Daimler, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Here, Infineon, Intel, and Volkswagen — published a whitepaper (“Safety First For Automated Driving”) describing a framework for the development, testing, and validation of “safe” autonomous vehicles. The members claim it’s the broadest representation across the industry to date, and they say that the report — which runs 146 pages — is the largest to offer “clear traceability” proving autonomous vehicles to be “safer than the average driver.”…

Conspicuously absent from the list of contributors is Alphabet’s Waymo, which recently launched a commercial driverless taxi service that’s now servicing over 1,000 riders with a fleet of more than 600 cars. GM’s Cruise Automation, whose self-driving car prototypes racked up 450,000 autonomous miles in California last year, also opted not to participate. Neither did veritable AV powerhouses like Zoox, Tesla, Amazon-backed Aurora, Beijing-based Pony.ai, Nvidia, or Yandex’s driverless car division.
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