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In the future, the functions of autonomous driving could fundamentally change all road traffic; to do so, it would have to be implemented on a large scale, in series production.

With autonomous driving, a technological system will replace humans in driving automobiles. The car industry, universities, and large IT companies, are currently working on implementing functions permitting a technological system to take on vehicle operation.

The development of autonomous vehicles currently focuses on the functionality of vehicle guidance systems.

Cars have for a long time been a symbol for the freedom and autonomy of their users. Now autonomous driving raises the question how the data flows related to autonomous driving influence the privacy of these cars’ users. Therefore this chapter discusses five guiding questions on autonomous driving, data flows, and the privacy impact of vehicles interacting with other entities: (1) Which “new” or additional data are being collected and processed due to autonomous driving and which consequences result from those “new” or additional data being collected and processed? (Sect. ); (2) Are certain types of data special and do they cause special hindrances? (Sect. ); (3) What is required from the perspective of privacy? (Sect. ); (4) When building architectures, what needs to be kept in mind to avoid creating difficult or even unsolvable privacy problems? (Sect. ); (5) What needs to be considered in the long term? (Sect. ). The questions will be discussed relating as much as possible to the case studies that were introduced at the beginning of this book. Sect.  concludes this text including an analysis whether more autonomy of driving vehicles leads to more privacy problems.

The “Autonomous driving on the roads of the future: Villa Ladenburg Project” by the Daimler und Benz-Stiftung looks at degrees of automation that will only become technically feasible in the distant future.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) hold the promise of saving tens of thousands of lives each year in the U.S., and many more worldwide, reducing traffic, saving energy, and providing mobility to those who cannot drive conventional cars. Nonetheless, AVs will inevitably have some accidents. On balance, AVs are likely to prevent many more accidents than they cause, but there will be at least some accidents involving AVs that would not have occurred with conventional vehicles.

This chapter begins with two fundamental questions: How should risk be allocated in the face of significant uncertainty—and who should decide? Its focus on public actors reflects the significant role that legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts will play in answering these questions, whether through rules, investigations, verdicts, or other forms of public regulation. The eight strategies discussed in this chapter would in effect regulate that regulation. They seek to ensure that those who are injured can be compensated (by expanding public insurance and facilitating private insurance), that any prospective rules develop in tandem with the technologies to which they would apply (by privileging the concrete and delegating the safety case), that reasonable design choices receive sufficient legal support (by limiting the duration of risk and excluding the extreme), and that conventional driving is subject to as much scrutiny as automated driving (by rejecting the status quo and embracing enterprise liability).

Based on many years’ expertise, Thomas Winkle traces the technical improvements in vehicle safety over recent decades, factoring in growing consumer expectations. Through Federal Court of Justice rulings on product liability and economic risks, he depicts requirements that car manufacturers must meet. For proceedings from the first idea until development to sign off, he recommends interdisciplinary, harmonized safety and testing procedures. He argues for further development of current internationally agreed-upon standards including tools, methodological descriptions, simulations, and guiding principles with checklists. These will represent and document the practiced state of science and technology, which has to be implemented technically suited and economically reasonable.

What attitudes and expectations do (potential) future users, and the public at large, bring to the new technology of autonomous driving? Alongside the technical and legal areas of research, this question is moving into ever-greater focus. The emerging debates assume that a switch from conventional to autonomous driving might bring about clear changes for all road users. From these perspectives—individual users and society—the question of acceptance arises. To what extent are individuals ready to use fully-automated vehicles, and to what extent are we as a society prepared to accept a transport system with fully automated vehicles on the road?

Technological advancement is changing societal risk constellations. In many cases the result is significantly improved safety and accordingly positive results such as good health, longer life expectancies and greater prosperity. However, the novelty of technological innovations also frequently brings with it unintended and unforeseen consequences, including new risk types.