The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet updated lawmakers this week on how they're making room on the road for driverless vehicles.

A law welcoming these rare automobiles went into effect in July.

Our June Lefler has more on this report.

The state is responsible for maintaining roads that serve all users from pedestrians and cyclists to now driverless cars.

And we're working on continued implementation of strategies, particularly within the connected and automated space that not only help automated driving systems, but also help the human driver.

So examples of these that you may have seen at home in your districts are things like wider pavement markings.

One of the things that helps both the automated vehicle as well as the human driver, are making sure that those markings are in good shape and that they're a little wider so that they're easier to see, not only for the for the naked eye, for the for the human eye, but also for that automated driving system.

Highway markers extend to data that can be seen on digital devices.

Basically, this is a protocol where we can communicate about work zone information, what types of lane closures we might have, what those locations are.

And we communicate those not only out there to be consumed by our partners who will bring them to you and your vehicle.

Like if you're a user of like Waze or Apple Maps or Google Maps or any of those types of things, but also that can be brought in by a connected or automated vehicle in order for the vehicle to know and understand what's happening in the work zone ahead.

State lawmakers approved autonomous vehicles on Kentucky roads just this year.

Thankful to hear you talking about safety.

Safety's been a big issue for me on this topic.

You know, maybe it's because it's new.

I don't know.

Maybe I'm afraid to change.

But I do know from my own experiences that I've seen too many mangled bodies.

I've had to hold people when they take their last breath from car accidents.

And that's what humans drive.

So it scares the daylights out of me.

When we start talking about computers driving.

Do you have an anticipate timeline when we may see this begin in Kentucky as far as actually seeing these vehicles on the roadway?

I think that the jury is still out and I think that there are a lot of these vehicle companies and a lot of these technology companies are continuing to work on what that looks like, how to safely implement, because the companies themselves are obviously interested in safety as well.

They don't want to be putting a product out there that that harms folks.

But the what that looks like here in Kentucky, it's been being implemented.

There are definitely folks that are implemented or that are interested in like pilot activities and looking at small scale operations and trying to do things.

State law sets a $1 million insurance liability for these vehicles.

Owners also have to let the D.O.T.

know how they will respond when police pull over the vehicle, whether they're inside the car or not.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm June Leffler.

Thank you.

June.

Goldman-Sachs projects that by the year 2030, 10% of new cars purchased will have a feature that allows drivers to take their eyes off the road.