Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Josh Sharfstein.

Today, autonomous vehicles that are known as self-driving cars. Just how safe are they?

I speak to Dr. Jonathan Asani, an expert in traffic safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Since this podcast was recorded, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

forced Tesla to recall more than 350,000 vehicles with so-called self-driving systems.

Let's listen.

Dr. Jonathan Asani, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call to talk about autonomous self-driving vehicles.

It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Josh.

Now, I know your career has been focused on traffic safety.

Tell me how you think of what an autonomous or self-driving vehicle is.

Autonomous cars, you can think of them like levels of automation.

That's a term that's widely used in the industry and you might

have heard people throw words around like L1 or L2. And really you can think of them as a continuum.

A lot of us in our cars might have a feature like lane keeping or cruise control, but the cruise control could be kind of tethered to the

speed of the vehicle you're following. Those are already in the ballpark of some automation.

So those are called level one driver assistance features. Level two is the next level where

some of those things become combined.

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