In the End-to-End Era, Is Scenario-Based Safety Evaluation for Autonomous Driving Still Valid?
Abstract: End-to-end architectures are moving from research papers to mass production, yet the cornerstone of global autonomous driving safety evaluation — scenario-based development and testing — still rests on the assumption that systems can be decomposed into perception, planning, and control modules. This article systematically analyzes five structural challenges that scenario methods face in the end-to-end era, argues that they remain valid but are no longer sufficient, and proposes an evolutionary path that supplements scenario methods with large-scale aerial naturalistic driving data within a three-layer collaborative framework. ...