  Artificial intelligence (AI) features are increasingly being embedded in cars
and are central to the operation of self-driving cars (SDC). There is little or
no effort expended towards understanding and assessing the broad legal and
regulatory impact of the decisions made by AI in cars. A comprehensive
literature review was conducted to determine the perceived barriers, benefits
and facilitating factors of SDC in order to help us understand the suitability
and limitations of existing and proposed law and regulation. (1) existing and
proposed laws are largely based on claimed benefits of SDV that are still
mostly speculative and untested; (2) while publicly presented as issues of
assigning blame and identifying who pays where the SDC is involved in an
accident, the barriers broadly intersect with almost every area of society,
laws and regulations; and (3) new law and regulation are most frequently
identified as the primary factor for enabling SDC. Research on assessing the
impact of AI in SDC needs to be broadened beyond negligence and liability to
encompass barriers, benefits and facilitating factors identified in this paper.
Results of this paper are significant in that they point to the need for deeper
comprehension of the broad impact of all existing law and regulations on the
introduction of SDC technology, with a focus on identifying only those areas
truly requiring ongoing legislative attention.
