“Who pays when a driverless car crashes?”

That is the question being asked by Thatcham Research and the Association of British Insurers

One of the key challenges for the future of automated driving will be determining where liability rests in the event of an accident with an automated car. A central part of making sure claims are settled fairly will be to understand who was in control of the vehicle at the time – the driver or the car? Cars of the future will thus need to collect data that will help insurers can determine whether the driver or the car was in control of the vehicle at the time.

This is the message coming from vehicle safety technology body Thatcham Research and the Association of British Insurers (ABI).

Peter Shaw, chief executive at Thatcham Research, said: “Future legislation needs to protect the consumer so that in the event of an accident, responsibility and who pays can be quickly determined. Was it driver error or a failure of the automated driving system?

“This can only happen if their insurer has access to key data about the crash. We would like to see car manufacturers and legislators working together with the insurance industry to develop a framework to make this happen. It’s in everyone’s interests to be able to establish the facts quickly and the proposals for standardised data being put forward by UK insurers would achieve this.”

The ABI is working to have a standard set of data agreed at an international level that would be easily accessible in the event of an accident involving a highly automated vehicle. This would include an indication of whether the vehicle was operating autonomously or not, and what technology was in use. The UN body responsible for vehicle regulations is preparing to impose its own data requirements on motor manufacturers from 2019, which insurers in the UK are hoping to influence for the benefit of motorists.

Huw Evans, the ABI’s director general, said: “Insurance is an increasingly innovative sector, constantly responding to evolving technology. We have created new ways for people to manage their motor insurance via their smart phones, and a service to collate people’s pension savings online is in development. Insurance enables technological advances in other sectors, and we are backing the development of automated cars one hundred per cent.

“As part of insurers’ commitment to getting automated cars on the road and dramatically improving road safety, there will need to be basic data easily available to make sure customers are looked after if something goes wrong. This would offer public reassurance by protecting motorists from being incorrectly blamed if something fails with their car, helping police investigations and supporting prompt insurance pay outs.”

The information collected would be used to:

• establish liability for anything that had gone wrong
• inform emergency services’ investigations
• ensure insurance claims could be processed promptly
• help vehicle manufacturers improve their products. 

On occasions where faulty technology was shown to have caused an accident insurers should be able to recover the costs from the manufacturer the ABI says, helping keep insurance premiums down.

The information insurers want to see universally collected only concerns the autonomous systems and driver interaction. It is not being proposed that any information measuring driver performance should be gathered.

The data would cover a period from 30 seconds before to 15 seconds after an incident and is:

• a GPS record of the time and location of the incident
• confirmation of whether the vehicle was in autonomous or manual mode
• if in autonomous mode, whether the vehicle was parking or driving
• when the vehicle went into autonomous mode, and when the driver last interacted with the system
• any driver activity such as braking or steering
• whether the driver’s seat was occupied, and whether the seatbelt was fastened.