The advent of self-driving cars is raising questions in the insurance sector about who should pay when the vehicles crash and how insurers will set equitable rates. When cars can operate themselves, the central question will be whether accidents are the manufacturer's responsibility and therefore covered by product liability insurance or whether the fault would lie with the driver and be covered by personal auto insurance. While even today's most advanced cars aren't fully autonomous, experts say such cars are coming and the insurance question will only become more urgent. When a Tesla crashed near Houston last month, killing the two occupants, the initial focus was on Tesla's self-driving technology, prompting CEO Elon Musk to deny that the car in question had those capabilities. Musk said data logs showed the car didn't have a full self-driving computer installation and the automaker's separate "Autopilot" feature wasn't enabled.

After recognizing that a collision of some kind is inevitable, the system works by analyzing all available options and choosing the course of action with the least serious outcome. "What can we do in order to minimize the consequences?" said Amir Khajepour, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo. The first rule for the autonomous vehicle (AV) crash-mitigation technology is avoiding collisions with pedestrians. From there, it weighs factors such as relative speeds, angles of collision and differences in mass and vehicle type to determine the best possible manoeuvre, such as braking or steering in one direction or another. "We consider the whole traffic environment perceived by the autonomous vehicle, including all the other vehicles and obstacles around it," said Dongpu Cao, also a mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor at Waterloo.