Critical features of autonomous road transport from the perspective of technological regulation and law

Autonomous vehicular technology significantly stresses the issue of safety. Although the use of driverless cars raises considerable expectations of a general improvement in safety, new challenges concerning the safety aspects stem from the changing context. On the one hand, the paper addresses regulatory issues raised by the impact of technological changes, particularly standardization problems. On the other hand, the issue of liability questions is investigated as it might cause today’s main legal obstacle for the wide spreading of autonomous cars, especially as autonomous cars might jeopardize the existing approaches to vehicular liability. The aim of this paper is to scrutinize the basic problems in both fields. We provide what, at the current state-of-the-art, appear to be reasonable recommendations from the perspective of technological regulation and law, in order to deal with the main problems that might hamper the development of autonomous transport technology