The Association of British Insurers (ABI) is calling for the creation of an international standard set of core data that must be collected by autonomous vehicles and provided to insurance companies after a car accident.
The industry body said such data set should be shared by carmakers with insurers to help establish liability in incidents involving driverless cars.
“There will need to be basic data easily available to make sure customers are looked after if something goes wrong,” said ABI director general Huw Evans.
“This would offer the public reassurance by protecting motorists from being incorrectly blamed if something fails with their car, helping police investigations and supporting prompt insurance pay outs.”
In cases where faulty technology was shown to have caused an accident, the ABI said insurers should be able to recover costs from the car manufacturer.
According to the trade group, the proposed set of data to be collected by driverless cars will cover the period 30 seconds before and 15 seconds after any incident.
The data should tell and include the following:
- a GPS record of the time and location of the incident
- indication of whether the vehicle was in manual or autonomous mode
- what technology was in use
- when the vehicle went into autonomous mode
- when the driver last interacted with the system
- any driver activity such as braking or steering
- whether the driver’s seat was occupied
- whether the seatbelt was fastened
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