Feature Focused End-to-End Testing with Cypress; Who Shapes Road Safety? The Influence of Automakers, Government Regulators, and Safety Advocates on Driving Safety and Automation

Reducing the high U.S. road death rate will require coordinated efforts across industry, government, and civil society. Despite decades of efforts to improve vehicle technology and traffic enforcement, distracted driving, impaired driving, and unsafe road design kill about 38,000 Americans each year. While advanced driver assist systems can help, more fundamental socio-technical change is necessary. Automakers, regulators, and advocacies are competing to determine how best to improve road safety. My technical report analyzes the Cypress-based testing framework that transforms product specifications written in Gherkin into automated, executable end-to-end tests. The report leverages Cypress’s speed, real-time browser execution, and integration with modern web apps to create a more efficient testing process. The Cypress framework reduces manual regression testing, accelerates bug detection, and ensures higher software quality. Future improvements include expanding test coverage, enabling cross-browser compatibility, and deepening integration with CI/CD pipelines to enhance agility in software delivery. Close analysis of safety data, industry practices, and public messaging reveals that road safety is often shaped by private-sector interests at the expense of public accountability. Automakers and tech companies promote automation as a solution to human error, yet often resist regulation, selectively release crash data, and frame convenience features as safety innovations. In contrast, advocates demand stronger safety standards and accountability, but lack the influence necessary to compel policy change. In the absence of assertive federal agencies, US road safety efforts are fragmented, leaving the future of both automated and human-driven vehicle safety largely in hands of private-sector corporations.