2025 has the potential of being a pivotal year for the automated vehicle ecosystem, with various large-scale deployments in the Americas, Europe and Asia moving to the later stages of regulation, including the secondary legislation of the UK’s Automated Vehicles Act. However, one of the key challenges associated with understanding the safety of AV is in establishing the safety threshold or benchmark. Various approaches have been suggested, such as Careful & Competent Human Driver or comparison to historic accidents; however, a well-understood and accepted objective definition of safety for AV still evades the industry. The presentation offers an objective leading indicator-based approach to defining safety for AV and stopping criteria for their testing.