COMING INTO FORCE: WHEN WILL THE AUTOMATED VEHICLES ACT 2024 BE IMPLEMENTED?
Like the ‘sneak peek’ trailer for a long-anticipated miniseries, the UK government recently published its guidance on its ‘implementation programme’ for the Automated Vehicles Act 2024. Like a trailer, there were glimpses of many familiar locations and characters, with a few new details flashing by.
Some readers will be familiar with the Automated Vehicles Act 2024 but, in summary, it establishes a new regulatory framework for self-driving vehicles, based upon the recommendations of the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission in their reviews of the laws for automated vehicles (2018 to 2022). The Law Commissions’ recommendations were almost entirely accepted by the then-government in its CAM 2025 paper in August 2022 and provided the basis for the Automated Vehicles Bill 2023-24, which with cross-party support received Royal Assent in May 2024, becoming the Automated Vehicles Act 2024. The Labour government elected in July 2024 has continued to support it.
The Automated Vehicles Act 2024 places the regulation of self-driving vehicles within the familiar legal landscape of government authorisation of vehicles for use on roads and other public places and consequential law such as the requirement for compulsory third-party liability insurance. The 2024 Act is the second British Act to treat automated vehicles – the first (the Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018) extended third-party compulsory insurance requirements to self-driving vehicles and (recognising the defendant gap left by a ‘driverless’ vehicle) created a direct claim by the victim of a road traffic accident caused by such a vehicle when driving itself against either the vehicle’s motor insurer or the organisation permitted to use such a vehicle in public without insurance. So, both the 2018 and 2024 Acts can be seen as updates to the existing regulatory system under the Road Traffic Acts and related legislation.
But – as might be expected for a major developing technology – the Automated Vehicles Act 2024 takes matters several steps further than the existing system of motor vehicle regulation. In particular, under the 2024 Act:
- Self-driving vehicle safety will be assessed not only at the point of government approval of a vehicle for public use but also during the vehicle’s actual use, by a process of continuous safety monitoring (see section 38).
- Government has set out strong licensing and enforcement systems, including police-like investigatory powers, to ensure the safe manufacture of self-driving vehicles and the safe operation of self-driving services (see Parts 1 and 3).
- The ‘driver’ of a vehicle which is under the control of its automated system is recharacterized in law as the ‘user-in-charge’ of the vehicle and given immunity for the manner of the vehicle’s driving during that period of automation (see Part 2.)
- The mismarketing of a vehicle or system as self-driving when it lacks that capacity is punishable in criminal law (see sections 78 and 79).
The Automated Vehicles Act 2024 leaves a great deal to future regulations, which are yet to be published, and which will be subject to consultation, as required by the 2024 Act (sections 2 and 97). Most of the Act itself is therefore not yet in force, awaiting those regulations. The ‘Implementation Programme’ page published online on 26 February 2025 contains an update on the regulatory timetable, as it refers to implementation “in 2027”, which had previously been reported as 2026 (though other implementation dates had been speculated).
How the Act and its regulations will resolve important issues – such as the extent of permitted data-collection and sharing by a fully automated vehicle operator “with private businesses (such as vehicle manufacturers or insurers)” allowed by section 14 – is yet to be seen. Meanwhile, the Automated Vehicles Act 2024 does almost nothing in relation to advanced driver assistance systems which do not reach ‘self-driving’ capability (save for allowing the updating of type approval regulations assimilated through EU law relating to such vehicles, under section 91). The regulation of those high-technology vehicles has been left within the older system of vehicle type approval.
So, in summary, the Automated Vehicles Act 2024:
- Sits within a familiar regulatory framework, featuring many familiar concepts such as pre-use official approval of vehicle safety and compulsory insurance; but
- Adds its own, more radical features (such as ‘user-in-charge’ immunity, new investigatory powers and new misdescription offences); and
- Poses some new challenges (such as the scope of permitted data collection and data sharing) which it leaves to regulations (yet to be consulted upon) to address.
So, it’s a familiar galaxy, with some intriguing new characters and situations. But the full version is not with us yet. We await the coming into force of the Automated Vehicles Act 2024 with all its regulations, sometime in 2027.
So exciting – but still so far, far away.
Alex Glassbrook is a barrister at Temple Garden Chambers, the author of ‘Advanced, Automated and Electric Vehicle Law’ (Bloomsbury Professional) and the Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Road Transport Law at Imperial College London.
The NASA/ESA Hubble image above shows a spiral galaxy known as NGC 7331.
