Liability in the coming age of autonomous autos

While we are many years away from an autonomous utopia, where cars pick us up and drive us where we need to go without a human at the wheel, we are seeing the first steps toward self-driving cars. Volvo, Honda, Audi, Tesla--pretty much every auto manufacturer, plus Google and probably Apple--is incorporating advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) into cars we can buy right now. As humans transfer driving tasks to computers, it raises questions for the insurance industry. There will still be crashes on the way to that autonomous utopia, and insurance companies want to know who's going to pay. Volvo, for one, has stepped up to say that when one of its vehicles is in autonomous mode, Volvo is responsible for what happens.