Governing autonomous vehicles: emerging responses for safety, liability, privacy, cybersecurity, and industry risks

ABSTRACT

The benefits of autonomous vehicles (AVs) are widely acknowledged, but there are concerns about the extent of these benefits and AV risks and unintended consequences. In this article, we first examine AVs and different categories of the technological risks associated with them. We then explore strategies that can be adopted to address these risks, and explore emerging responses by governments for addressing AV risks. Our analyses reveal that, thus far, governments have in most instances avoided stringent measures in order to promote AV developments and the majority of responses are non-binding and focus on creating councils or working groups to better explore AV implications. The US has been active in introducing legislations to address issues related to privacy and cybersecurity. The UK and Germany, in particular, have enacted laws to address liability issues; other countries mostly acknowledge these issues, but have yet to implement specific strategies. To address privacy and cybersecurity risks strategies ranging from introduction or amendment of non-AV specific legislation to creating working groups have been adopted. Much less attention has been paid to issues such as environmental and employment risks, although a few governments have begun programmes to retrain workers who might be negatively affected.

KEYWORDS:

• Autonomous vehicles
• automated driving
• policy
• governance
• risks
• safety
• liability
• privacy
• cybersecurity
• incumbent industries

Acknowledgements

Araz Taeihagh is grateful for the support provided by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore through the Start-up Research Grant. Authors thank the three anonymous reviewers and the SI editor for their helpful comments and Eduardo Araral for his encouragements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Araz Taeihagh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4812-4745

Notes

1. AVs are also referred to as driverless vehicles, as they are expected to operate safely without supervision and in all environments (Lin, 2016).

2. For a comprehensive study of the societal implications of AVs, see Milakis et al. (2017a).

3. For a full definition of technological risks, see the section entitled “Risks of AVs”.

4. In this article, we focus on safety, liability, privacy, cybersecurity, industry influence risks associated with AVs. This is because while AVs potentially pose other risks such as to levels of congestion, the environment, land use, public infrastructure investment, government revenues or even organ shortage (Brodsky, 2016; Milakis et al., 2017; Bischoff & Maciejewski, 2016; Clements & Kockelman, 2017), these risks have not received enough attention from governments (see more in the next Section).

5. Deanonymisation, the process of using “background knowledge and cross-correlation with other databases”, allows an unauthorised person to re-identify individual data records (Narayanan & Shmatikov, 2008).

6. Interconnected AVs are connected to one or more external communication networks, and the ability to send and receive external information keeps the vehicle up to date with the immediate roadway environment, allowing it to engage with other vehicles on the road and negotiate manoeuvres which are purported to be advantageous for road safety and efficiency (Piao & McDonald, 2008).

7. The EU GDPR was first introduced in 2012 (EU, 2016).

8. A similar Cyber AIR Act has been passed for aircraft (Bender, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore [Start-up Research Grant].