Volvo: We will be responsible for accidents caused by our driverless cars

This confident statement was also echoed by Google and Mercedes-Benz, who also said that they would take on the burden if anything unfortunate occurs caused by their autopilot features.

It will be very interesting to see how quickly other vehicle manufacturers will adopt the same mentality regarding their own autonomous projects.

Hakan Samuelsson, president of the Swedish automaker, said in Washington, D.C. that although the U.S.is the “the most progressive country in the world in autonomous driving”, a lack of federal guidelines could cost the country “its leading position”. However, Volvo now say a legal “patchwork” across Europe is slowing down the technologies progress.

Volvo is working on to ensure zero fatalities (involving its cars) by the year 2020 and fully autonomous vehicles would be an integral part of this challenging objective.

The absence of existing rules makes hard for companies to design, produce and especially test developing cars which could continue to delay the development of the technology, especially with guidelines changing from state to state.

“Everybody is aware of the fact that driverless technology will never be flawless – one day there will be an accident”, chief technical officer Erik Coelingh told the BBC.

Of course, for this to happen, any incidents would need to take place while the car’s autonomous mode was enabled, otherwise it’s money out of your pocket. Google has clocked up over 1 million autonomous miles on the roads around Mountain View, and in March automotive component maker Delphi was allowed to autonomously drive a specially adapted Audi from San Francisco to New York, a record distance of 5,471km. Auto hacking has become a hot topic in the industry following several high profile cases that have shown how connected cars on sale today can be tampered with over the internet and controlled by hackers.

“We are constantly evolving defensive software to counter the risks associated with hacking a vehicle”, Samuelsson said.