General Insurance Article - Germany plans to map out laws for driverless cars

 Alexander Dobrindt said such robot cars would probably become a feature on German roads within a few years, but insisted that some rules needed to be in place first. He has created a committee, including figures from research, industry and politics, to draw up a legal framework that would make such cars permissible and would like a draft of key points ready before the Frankfurt car fair in September.

  

 Current rules do not allow self-drive on German roads because a human must always be at the controls, according to the 1968 Vienna convention on road traffic to which Germany is signed up, along with 72 other countries. Questions to be answered include who would be responsible if the car's computer failed causing an accident, how a robot car would be insured and how licences would be regulated.

  

 A few days ago Dobrindt announced he was designating a stretch of Germany's busy A9 autobahn in Bavaria for testing robot car prototypes.

  

 The German car industry has been working on driverless cars for years and expects the first commercially available models to be introduced by 2020. But the industry has become nervous about competing technology from Google, leading to a campaign to remain ahead of the field.

  

 In 2014 Mercedes-Benz presented its Future Truck 2025, a driverless vehicle which can reach speeds of up to 50mph, while the Audi prototype, the RS7, reached speeds of almost 150mph on the Formula One circuit at Hockenheim track.

 (c) 2015 Guardian Newspapers Limited.