The fully autonomous car—one that will carry you from point A to B with no human intervention—is coming. We're not quite there yet; the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) has laid out four different levels of autonomous car and even the most advanced adaptive cruise control systems on sale today represent only level 2 autonomy. But the technology for level 4 autonomous vehicles is not far off. Yesterday, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk told Ars that he thought Tesla would have the technology solved in about three years. Even the more cautious estimates we've heard from companies developing self-driving cars predict that they'll be safer than human drivers within a decade. In fact, everyone in the industry that Ars has talked to agrees on one thing: the technology is going to be ready before we—society—are ready for it.

Before we start buying self-driving cars, people will need to be convinced that they're safe and that they won't be hacked or used to spy on us. Regulators will need new ways of satisfying themselves that the machines they're allowing onto the roads are a safety improvement. And we'll want to know who is liable for any collisions that happen when a car is driving itself. Last week we attended a debate hosted by Volvo and the Swedish Embassy in Washington, DC to delve into these topics.

Here in the US, safety is the main force pushing us toward self-driving cars. NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind gave a keynote address, telling the audience that 32,000 deaths a year on the road is unacceptable, particularly when 94 percent of them are attributed to driver error. "If technology will reduce deaths on American roads, [the NHTSA is] for it, right now," he said. Rosekind also said that safety innovations should be pushed beyond the option lists of luxury cars and be available across the entire passenger fleet.

As might be expected for a car company that has used safety as a unique selling proposition, that message was well received by Volvo. Its CEO, Håkan Samuelsson, has set the company a goal: by 2020, no one should be killed or seriously injured in one of its new cars. Samuelsson also had some bold advice for other car makers on the contentious topic of liability. "When you drive manually, the driver is responsible. When it's automatic, we as the manufacturer are liable. If you're not ready to make such a statement, you're not ready to develop autonomous solutions," he said. It's a commendable approach, and we're curious to see if other OEMs follow Volvo's lead.

The panel debate that followed exposed the quandary that state and federal regulators are starting to find themselves in. Agencies like the NHTSA normally create regulations in response to specific problems. Crash impact regulations might get tougher following a string of deaths in a shoddily designed car, for example. But in this case, the agencies are being asked—mainly by elected officials—to decide the rules for self-driving cars before they really have a handle on them. As Brian Soublet of the California DMV pointed out, he knows how to test a 16-year-old's driving skills, but he can't say the same for a car. At the same time, these regulators know that when a death inevitably happens—no amount of self-driving cars will reduce annual road deaths to zero—they'll be attacked for allowing unsafe vehicles on the road.

Right now, autonomous cars are probably in more danger from human drivers than vice versa. Almost all of the collisions involving Google's self-driving cars have been other cars rear-ending the wheeled robots . There's now a growing belief that overly cautious AI may not mix well with some impatient humans and that rigidly obeying traffic laws might not be the same as driving safely. It's hard to see a government mindset approving a car without insisting that it follows the letter of the law at all times.

That view wasn't shared by Princeton's Alain Kornhauser. "Laws were written for humans. Laws will have to respect what algorithms can do. If a car can tell it's safe, why shouldn't it perform a rolling stop?" he asked. For its part, Volvo sees a positive side to cautious cars that drive sedately and safely. "The price you pay is your trip might take you longer. Time is a luxury. You get your time back when you have a self-driving car," said Erik Coelingh, a senior engineer at the company.

Listing image by Sam Churchill @ Flickr