Vehicle safety regulations and ADAS: tensions between law and technology

The introduction of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in road traffic raises many complex questions. One of them is to what extent current legal frameworks are fit to accommodate the market introduction of ADAS and on which points they need to be amended to adequately facilitate the smooth implementation of ADAS. This paper is focusing on vehicle safety regulation. The ratio behind this type of regulation is that governments want to assure some minimum levels of safety of vehicles and included equipment. However, in areas of innovative, rapidly developing technologies such as ADAS formal regulation is often criticized for being too slow and to inflexible, obstructing technological developments. In this paper the current European regulatory framework is analysed. It is concluded that the speed of technological developments as well as the innovative and specific nature of ADAS technology call for modifications in the legal framework in order to keep a desired balance between governmental safety concerns and unobstructed development of ADAS.