Hi everybody welcome to shift a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, reporter at the

automotive news and your host. Hey there Pete this is Leslie Allen, editor

Shift magazine. And Alexa St. John, covering tech and suppliers.

Joining us on the podcast today

is Jessica Kekino, Vice President for Research

at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. She is a co-author of a recent

study from I.H.S. that concluded that self-driving vehicles could struggle to eliminate

most crashes, which goes against a lot of industry thinking

that because human error is responsible for 94% of crashes, that 94% of accidents might be eliminated with the arrival of autonomous

vehicles.

But before we get to Jessica and I.I.H.S. study, Leslie, I know that you were paying a lot of attention this week to some other automated vehicle news

from the Department of Transportation, which has a new automated vehicle

testing initiative. What did you learn about that this week? Well, hi, I know that

this week NHTSA, which is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

which is of course part of the US Department of Transportation they started

an initiative that allows autonomous vehicle companies to voluntarily submit information

about their testing. And this is sort of significant because there is really no national requirement for these automakers or these auto companies, I should say, to disclose information, disclose their data from

self-driving testing. Usually when we hear about some sort of data, it's coming out of a state.

It's coming out of California, usually. And so now we're going to have a national database, so to speak, although it is a voluntary effort, it at least looks like a step forward.

And I know that in addition to announcing

that they were going to begin this initiative,

they had a series of meetings

...