News

The AdaptIVe Workshop on Legal Aspects will take place at the Federation of French Car Manufacturers (Comité des Constructeurs Français d’Automobile) in Paris, France, on Thursday, September 17, 2015.

Representatives from road authorities, administrations, industry and research will come together to discuss perspectives on automated driving regulations. The workshop will open discussions on an international scale, inviting speakers from Japan and the U.S.

Assessing the legal questions that arise from automation is a core concern of the AdaptIVe project, with a focus on product liability, road traffic law, regulatory law, data privacy and data security. There are still some legal hurdles to overcome on the path to automated driving: the challenges posed by regulatory law and admission law, both at the national and international level, must still be surmounted. Aside from which, uncertainty also exists on the part of all those involved in vehicle automation with respect to how tort law will deal with these systems.

In the area of regulatory law, contradictions arise that hinder further developments in automation under current regulatory schemes. Due to the legally standardized driver-side surveillance for any driving tasks, the automation potential as currently developed cannot be fully exploited. It remains to be seen to what extent recently initiated changes in the Vienna Convention and their implementation into national law will remedy this situation.

In addition, further legal issues arise with the introduction of automated vehicles due to laws regulating how vehicles are found to be roadworthy. While the areas of roadworthiness and automated operation both pose legal challenges, vehicle automation also creates widespread uncertainty in the assessment of liability risks under current tort law.

What should also not be overlooked is the challenges to data protection and data security laws that may arise from automated operation (through sensory data collection, the networking of individual systems and comprehensive networking of traffic data).

The AdaptIVe Legal Aspects Workshop will address the above issues and stimulate technical, legal and social discussions around the topic of automated driving.

Please come back later for more information on the AdaptIVe website.