Driving laws will undergo a comprehensive review to ensure the UK is ready and able to support the widespread introduction of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) onto its roads, the Government has said this week.

The Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission will undertake the three year reviews to  examine legal obstacles to the deployment of these vehicles and highlight the need for regulatory reforms.

 

Focus is likely to be placed on adjusting traditional laws to reflect the fact that self driving vehicles will not have a ‘driver’ or perhaps even a ‘steering wheel’ in the future.

 

The review will also consider how to allocate civil and criminal responsibility where there is shared control between a human driver and the vehicle itself, as well as looking at the impact of CAVs on other road users.

 

Roads Minister Jesse Norman commented: “The UK is a world leader for self driving vehicle research and development, and this work marks an important milestone in our continued commitment to the technology.

 

“With driving technology advancing at an unprecedented rate, it is important that our laws and regulations keep pace so that the UK can remain one of the world leaders in this field.”

 

Law Commissioner for England and Wales Nicholas Paines said: “British roads are already among the safest in the world and automated vehicles have the potential to make them even safer. Provided our laws are ready for them.

 

“We’ll now start consulting widely on how the law should work with this new technology and develop reforms which enable the use of self driving vehicles in the years to come.”

 

Scottish Law Commissioner Caroline Drummond added: “Automated vehicles could have a big impact on the way we live and work so it’s important that, UK wide, we have a legal system which can accommodate them.”

 

♦ Also this week, it was announced that a system for allowing self driving cars to perceive obstacles around blind corners will be tested as part of a new CAV project, known as CORAM.

 

Technology company Propelmee is working with the Transport Systems Catapult and Cranfield University to take forward the project with Government funding. The partners will research how ‘look ahead’ and ‘non line of sight’ perception can be communicated to any CAV from infrastructure deployed sensors.

 

Meanwhile members of the public are now being invited to test a fleet of driverless pods as part of the GATEway autonomous vehicle research project, led by TRL, at the Greenwich peninsula.

 

The trials mark the final phase of the project, which seeks to understand public acceptance of, and attitudes towards, driverless vehicles.