Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter at the Automotive News.

Hello everyone and happy Thanksgiving week. This is Leslie Allen. I am editor of Shift magazine.

Joining us in just a few minutes on the podcast today is Marjorie Blumenthal.

She's a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation and she sat down with

Alexa St. John and I earlier this week to discuss her latest paper on automated vehicle safety, which basically asks the question how safe is safe enough to deploy automated vehicle fleets and not to give

too much away here in the early going but her answer is that there is no easy answer.

And Leslie, I think that kind of plays into a lot of the news

we've seen this week on the automated vehicle front.

Yeah, and you bought a story that I found very interesting

just about this whole trend of automation complacency.

Can you walk us through a little bit, Pete, about automation complacency and what that is and why people are concerned about it?

Sure. You know, I think a key point is that automation does not equal autonomy.

And we see a lot of companies, perhaps marketing

a driver assist systems as autonomous ones,

or consumers certainly receiving them and interpreting a driver assist system

as one that is autonomous. So the idea of automation complacency is in cars that still need

human drivers where humans are responsible for the vehicle operations,

the complacency is the idea that the assist is essentially lulling a human driver

into a false sense of security?

I think I can relate to that because I don't I still have basically a level

zero vehicle but I do have blind spot monitoring on my car.

And I find that, you know, I should be looking more,

...