Level 5
(Anastasia, 2025)
What Features Are Present
Level 5 marks the pinnacle of our scale, and of autonomous vehicles. These cars can fully drive themselves, 100% of the time. There are no restrictions to areas or specific roads, and can be trusted to get places safely. Even in bad conditions, such as snow or roadwork, they are expected to behave correctly and safely, to get the passengers to their destination. These vehicles are very similar to level 4 vehicles, but since they can go everywhere, they are more likely to be used as personal or family vehicles.
Examples
There are no examples of fully autonomous level 5 vehicles in production today, not even as demo or one off vehicles. We still have not gotten the technology necessary to implement a level 5 vehicle, so they remain a dream.
Security
There are countless security concerns with level 5 vehicles, as their environment and applications are so varied. Many stem from the network side of things, where these vehicles will be communicating with each other to get a better picture of what is going on. This is really vital to the performance of autonomous vehicles, but could easily result in people falsifying this data, and could lead to crashes, incapacitated vehicles, and other bad situations. The good side of this is that since none of these vehicles exist, there is a plethora of researchers and papers focusing on preventing security risks in autonomous vehicles before they ever hit the road.
Safety
Whilst every safety concern is still theoretical, the large variety of environments these vehicles will see means that unless they are perfect, there will be a situation where they aren’t perfectly capable, and it is up for the companies to make sure that their vehicles operate in a safe manner when the situation gets out of hand and they encounter something unexpected.