Volvo Will Take Blame if One of Its Self-Driving Cars Crashes

Ahead of a speech to be delivered in Washington, D.C., by Volvo Cars CEO Håkan Samuelsson on Thursday, the company has laid out its concerns about roadblocks to moving forward on self-driving tech in a press release. As has been frequently suggested by automakers and industry experts alike, Volvo thinks the biggest barriers are regulatory, not technological.

Part of that slow-moving regulatory framework needs to capture how liability works in an autonomous world — who takes the blame when a car controlled by a computer gets into a crash? Volvo says in its statement that it “will accept full liability whenever one if its cars is in autonomous mode,” which is really, really big news — most of the conversation around autonomous liability has been in posing questions, not answering them, so having automakers take full responsibility could go a long way toward simplifying the rules of a self-driving road.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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