The 2021 Law and Mobility Conference opened with a panel, moderated by Emily Frascaroli, that set out to begin answering three questions: What are emerging transportation technologies? What is the legal landscape surrounding these technologies? What are some challenges that these technologies face, in terms of both gaining…

By Christopher Chorzepa and Phillip Washburn Week 2 of the 2021 Law and Mobility Conference opened with a discussion, moderated by C. Ndu Ozor, focusing on a variety of topics: inequalities and equity issues in our transportation system, how to…

News and commentary about automated vehicles (AVs) focus on how they look and appear to operate, along with the companies developing and testing them. Behind the scenes are legal regimes—laws, regulations, and implementing bodies of different kinds—that literally and figuratively provide the rules of the road for AVs. Legal regimes matter because public welfare hinges on aspects of AV design and operation. Legal regimes can provide gatekeeping for AV developers and operators seeking to use public roads, and they can allocate liability when something goes wrong. Guiding and complementing legal regimes is public policy. Policy documents such as articulations of national strategies are sometimes used to address issues related to legal regimes and to demonstrate a jurisdiction’s support for AV development. Building on its long history analyzing AV policy issues, RAND (with support of its Institute for Civil Justice) collaborated with the University of Michigan Law School’s Law and Mobility Program to study the nature of different AV legal regimes around the world. It selected countries known to be active in this domain. The research team reviewed and shared scholarly and gray literature (which is a type of scholarship produced by an entity in which commercial publications are not the primary focus, such as white papers from a government agency), and it also consulted experts in these regimes from the public and private sectors. Under the supervision of the Law and Mobility Fellow (a lawyer), law students collected and studied materials associated with country-specific legal regimes and drafted summaries guided by RAND’s enumeration of key factors. Availability of information about legal regimes varies—access to documentation, especially in English, is uneven, even for officials in different countries working collaboratively on these issues. That constrained availability is reflected in published legal comparisons, and it motivated the research team’s systematic research, which drew from materials in English and other languages. This article summarizes the makeup of AV legal regimes of Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. It highlights some key contrasts, which will be developed further as the project continues. It focuses on law and policy relating to highly to fully automated vehicles (SAE Levels 4 and 5). Although guided by a common set of topics for each country, each profile reflects the material available and the factors that differentiate national approaches. The remainder of this article introduces the legal regimes of the covered countries in turn. It then provides an overview of key points of comparison and outlines future work.

Earlier this month, two Texas men died when the Tesla Model S they were traveling in crashed into a tree. However, just what led to the crash remains a point of contention between authorities and Tesla itself. The police have said that one passenger was found in the…

It’s time to be honest with ourselves: a lot of us love the convenience of facial recognition software (FRS) especially when it comes to unlocking our cell phones. There is officially no reason to get Cheeto dust on your screen while you Instagram stalk your former high school classmates before…

Recently, I wrote about the prospects for federal legislation addressing connected and autonomous vehicles. While the subject will be taken up in the new Congress, the failed push for a bill at the end of 2018 is an indication of the steep hill any CAV legislation will have to…

By the end of this year, Alphabet subsidiary Waymo plans to launch one of the nation’s first commercial driverless taxi services in Phoenix, Arizona. As preparations move forward, there has been increasing attention focused on Arizona’s regulatory scheme regarding connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), and the ongoing debate over…

The delivery industry is evolving in order to keep up with the rise of home delivery. Arrival, a startup company in the process of building electric delivery vans, plans to add new vehicles to the roads in the next few years. The company plans to offer vehicles with different…

Tesla’s enthusiastic marketing of its Autopilot feature may be landing the company in legal hot water. Last week, a Florida man sued the car manufacturer after his Model S crashed into a stalled vehicle at high speed. The driver, who allegedly suffered spinal and brain injuries, claims that Tesla’s…

As we move towards a future of fully automated vehicles, the types of crime – and attendant need for criminal enforcement – committed with cars is likely to evolve. As our transit system becomes more automated, the danger of a hack, and the difficulty of discovering the crime through ordinary…