NSW road rules will need at least 150 changes to allow autonomous vehicles to operate, a conference on driverless cars has been told.
Roads Minister Melinda Pavey, NRMA director Tim Trumper and experts in the field discussed the need for legislative amendments on Friday.
"At last count, we've identified 150 pieces of legislation that will need amending to ensure automated vehicles can legally operate on our state's roads," Ms Pavey told the Sydney conference.
Mr Trumper has recently returned from Silicone Valley in San Francisco where he saw first-hand some of the technological advancements in driverless cars.
"There is now computational power in the car which can pierce a tree," Mr Trumper told AAP on Friday.
"So the human being will see the tree, but this is a technology that is looking through the tree and spotting movement on the other side, basically saying there is a truck on the other side of the tree and it's moving.
"It's then saying the truck's trajectory looks like this, its chances of impacting are these, signalling all of this back inside the car."
Ms Pavey said the state government had "no small task" ahead of them to legislate for the new technology.
From defining who's liable when an automated driving system is activated to considering the implications of compulsory third party insurance, the list is long.
The experts on the panel say making people feel safe is the key to a successful driverless car future.
"If you think about when elevators went into buildings, they all had drivers and people were terrified to be in an elevator without a driver," Mr Trumper said.
"Now we get into elevators 24-seven and no one thinks about it and there will be a time when cars and autonomy will feel like that."
