Skip to main content

TÜV Rheinland and Southwest Research Institute sign MOU

Independent research and development organisation Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and testing and inspection services provider TÜV Rheinland Mobility have signed a memorandum of understanding to develop functional standards for the performance of autonomous driving on public roadways. Following the lead of Florida, California and Nevada, which have all developed regulations enabling autonomous driving, SwRI and TÜV Rheinland Mobility will collaborate to establish standards and performance metrics that w
January 15, 2013 Read time: 2 mins
Independent research and development organisation Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and testing and inspection services provider TÜV Rheinland Mobility have signed a memorandum of understanding to develop functional standards for the performance of autonomous driving on public roadways.

Following the lead of Florida, California and Nevada, which have all developed regulations enabling autonomous driving, SwRI and 2236 TÜV Rheinland Mobility will collaborate to establish standards and performance metrics that will enable the three leading and other states to evaluate and regulate the efficacy of automated driving.  

Both organisations will build on their experiences in the automotive, military, standards development and certification industries to develop standards that the automated driving industry can apply to measure its success. Nevada has required that the industry build such standards in the near future, and more states are expected to follow.

With a long history in the automotive industry, including certification for the transportation industry,  homologation, quality testing, and connected vehicle assessment and testing, the SwRI and TÜV Rheinland Mobility team looks to work with the government and industry to define the criteria that will meet the states’ requirements for testing and acceptable performance metrics for automated driving.

“Our team realises that the action of the states to begin regulating automated driving portends a national trend of the state and international actions to regulate this emerging industry,” said Suzanne Murtha, TÜV Rheinland Mobility. “We look forward to helping the industry stay ahead of this trend and, possibly, even include some of the forthcoming standards into the regulatory language.”

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Hyperloop: from sci-fi to transport policy
    April 16, 2020
    The future is here. While it has long looked like something from a sci-fi movie, Graham Anderson investigates a technology whose time might have come.
  • Necessity is the mother of invention
    April 6, 2016
    The Netherlands aims to lead Europe, and the world, in the area of cooperative ITS and smart mobility. That’s not an aspiration – it’s a necessity as Frans op de Beek, principal advisor for traffic management and ITS within the Rijkswaterstaat, the Ministry for Infrastructure and the Environment, explains.
  • Taking the long view of ITS
    March 24, 2015
    Caroline Visser believes the ITS industry must present a coherent case for consideration of the technology to become part of transport policy and planning. As ITS advisor and road finance director for the International Road Federation (IRF) in Geneva, Caroline Visser is well placed to evaluate quantifying the benefits of ITS implementation – a topic about which there is little agreement and even less consistency. She is pressing to get some consistency in the evaluation of ITS deployments through the use of
  • Making cars safer for vulnerable road users
    June 2, 2016
    Richard Cuerden considers measures to improve the safety of vulnerable road users. The competitive nature of the car market has seen an increase in protection for those travelling inside the vehicle and this is reflected in the casualty statistics -but the same does not apply to those outside the vehicle. And with current societal trends such as ageing populations, an increasing number of pedestrians and cyclists encouraged by environmental policies, this is an area that authorities such as the European Uni