Abstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show great promise for autonomous driving, but their suitability for safety-critical scenarios is largely unexplored, raising safety concerns. This issue arises from the lack of comprehensive benchmarks that assess both external environmental risks and in-cabin driving behavior safety simultaneously. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce DSBench, the first comprehensive Driving Safety Benchmark designed to assess a VLM's awareness of various safety risks in a unified manner. DSBench encompasses two major categories: external environmental risks and in-cabin driving behavior safety, divided into 10 key categories and a total of 28 sub-categories. This comprehensive evaluation covers a wide range of scenarios, ensuring a thorough assessment of VLMs' performance in safety-critical contexts. Extensive evaluations across various mainstream open-source and closed-source VLMs reveal significant performance degradation under complex safety-critical situations,