"‘The Vienna Convention is not just a static document ... it exists within international structures for vehicle safety and vehicle regulation,’ said Professor Bryant Walker Smith, a specialist in automated cars at the University of South Carolina, US. ‘As we’re looking for potential best practices, or even standards or eventually requirements, for those vehicles, those existing structures are useful.’
‘On the question of civil liability - that is, who pays for injuries that result - that will necessarily be fact-dependent and can be resolved using existing principles,’ he said. ‘Courts and others are already adept at dealing with complex crashes and complex liability.
‘The idea that liability is somehow a barrier is a very pessimistic view of the technology because it suggests that there will be so many crashes of such magnitude that no company will be able to predict or manage the loss.’"