Self-driving cars are already here. When will the law catch up? Australia could miss out on the potential safety benefits of automated vehicles – or end up with self-driving cars too dangerous to be on the road – if laws don’t catch up with technology widely available to local motorists, Victoria’s peak motoring group has warned. Tesla announced on Friday it was releasing the latest version of its semi-autonomous driving software in Australia, which can navigate city streets, stop at traffic lights and navigate into car parks without human input. The self-driving software is called Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and the carmaker tells drivers they “must be ready to take immediate action at all times” to take over from the automated system. Tesla’s marketing material shows its cars driving automatically around Melbourne’s CBD with a man sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands in his lap, not on the wheel – a practice that falls into a legal grey zone. RACV head of policy James Williams said the potential for automated driving systems to reduce road trauma was immense, given human error was a factor in about 90 per cent of all crashes. But Australian and Victorian laws were not keeping pace with technology that many Tesla drivers are already using, and which other car makers would soon roll out, he said. Victoria’s road rules say that a driver must have “proper control” of their vehicle but do not stipulate what this means, especially in a car that is steering, changing lanes, stopping and accelerating itself. “The advice from government has always been that means you should have one hand on the steering wheel. [But] it’s ambiguous so it needs to be resolved,” he said. Williams said the RACV’s position was that the law should be updated to state drivers