Insurance company AXA and law firm Burges Salmon have called on legislators to introduce standards for vehicles that can switch between autonomous and human driving.
The Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill, which will create a list of vehicles that will be considered ‘automated’, with liability to third parties falling on insurers, is currently making its way through Parliament, but it includes no provisions for an accident during the ‘handover’ between car and driver.
This handover period, according to the second in a series of reports on the insurance and legal issues connected to VENTURER, a public, private and academic initiative examining the wide scale adoption of connected and autonomous vehicles, could create a grey area for liability, especially if an accident happens during the ‘handover’ between driver and vehicle.
The current law expects the driver to be responsible for the vehicle at all times. This creates issues if there is a time lag in the driver regaining effective control after the vehicle has been driving autonomously, according to AXA and Burges Salmon’s report.
VENTURER’s handover trials, looking at the return to ‘baseline’ driving across a range different indicators, highlighted the delays expected in regaining full control at different speeds, with drivers taking almost three seconds to do so at 20mph, for example.
AXA and Burges Salmon recommend that government and industry take account of the iss