Toronto, Ontario — Autonomous vehicles (AVs) may actually lead to safer roads one day—that is a future challenge that the collision repair industry will have to seriously consider.
CEICA hosted a webinar on Thursday led by Tara Andringa, executive director at Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE), a non-profit organization that emphasizes public education about AVs.
When asked about how mass AV adoption will affect the collision repair industry, Andringa says collision repairers will need to join the conversation, given that this innovation has no real equivalents or historical precedents.
She brings up the example of law enforcement as another industry that faces intense shakeups—just like how police officers will figure out how to pull over an AV or get information from an empty AV, repairers need to learn about AV technology and prepare their industry for the shakeup.
Currently, no commercially available vehicles grant complete autonomy—all of them require an attentive driver to operate. In fact, fully autonomous vehicles do not currently exist according to the NHTSA. However, marketing terms such as full self-driving and autopilot were highlighted as potentially misleading for the average consumer, harming public trust in AV technology.
Given that AVs do not get tired, distracted and have better, and more complete vision than the average driver, it is extremely likely this technology will make driving safer and accessible to more people. By the time it’s rolled out, truly autonomous AVs will be among the most vetted technologies in the world.
“Its not that AV vehicles will instantly make the world better. It’s that if we’re thoughtful about it, the technology has the potential to make our transportation system better.”
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