Social-Legal Challenges of Self-driving Vehicles and Existing Policies

Intelligent Self-driving cars are stepping into public roads and policy makers and law makers are facing challenges in regulating different aspects of this new technology. Leading countries in the field of self-driving cars have adopted different strategies against this challenges and in order to manage negative effects the entrance of these vehicles into society may have. The main object of this contribution is to clarify the most important socio-legal challenges of self-driving cars and responses of leading countries to them. In order to reach the abovementioned aim, we considered researches published in the main academic sources during last ten years. Governmental documents and reports also have been considered to recognize past, current and future measures. The main socio-legal challenges of self-driving cars are: safety of self-driving cars, civil responsibility arising from collisions of these cars, Private confidentiality of passengers and finally security of computer systems of these vehicles. In response to safety challenge most of countries avoided imposing sever measures and adopted soft control policies in form of recommendations. With respect to the issue of civil responsibility, most countries either showed no response or followed a soft control policy in form of voluntary recommendations. Responses of considered countries in respect of private confidentiality challenge differs in range of making new regulations, insisting on current laws and making principles for private confidentiality matter.