As engineers design cars to make decisions without a human driver, one South Carolina lawmaker wants to know how self-driving cars would handle ethical dilemmas.

“My mind tends to drift towards the statistically rare but inevitable situation where there’s a bad and worse decision that has to be made by the car,” Rep. Micajah Caskey, IV, a Lexington, S.C. Republican said during a panel discussion on autonomous vehicles Wednesday. “It’s not terribly difficult to imagine a circumstance where you have a careening vehicle, and the vehicle might have to turn left and run over some schoolkids, go straight and hit the car that’s coming at me, turn right and hit a wall.”

At a National Conference of State Legislatures panel, Hilary Cain, director of technology and innovation policy for Toyota, noted how rare that circumstance would be but acknowledged that there is no easy answer.

“Raise your hand if you’ve ever had to choose between running over a bunch of kids or into a wall,” Cain asked the audience at a Boston Convention and Exhibition Center meeting room. No hands went up. She said, “It will happen and we have to have an answer for when it happens, but we also have to keep it in perspective, which is that most of us in the course of our driving lives have never had to choose between ourselves and somebody else.”

Autonomous vehicle enthusiasts have touted the potential for the technology to reduce human driving errors – deemed responsible for a majority of the 35,000 traffic fatalities in 2015.

Caskey, an attorney who served as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps, asked whether the vehicle owner would have a say in how the car responds to that type of dilemma, but Cain said she didn’t think the consumer would get that choice.

“The car will be programmed to make the best decision in that moment,” Cain said. “It may not be the best decision that all of us individually would have made in that situation, but our goal is to make it be the best decision that most of us would have made in that situation – sort of a reasonable person standard.”

Caskey, who supports autonomous vehicles, told the News Service he doesn’t have a particular course of action in mind, but thinks policymakers should think about the ethical decisions cars might have to make.

“It’s a tough problem and there really is no good answer, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a question we shouldn’t talk about, and shouldn’t address,” Caskey said. “On some level, shouldn’t you be entitled to buy a car that’s going to always look out for you? But then you think about what does that mean for everybody else?”

Advancements in automated driving have raised innumerable questions about how society and laws will adapt to the new technology.

In Massachusetts, Transportation Committee Co-chairman Rep. William Straus said entities, including government agencies, should think carefully before building new parking lots because autonomous vehicles could revolutionize how cars are stored.

“People should start anticipating now. If they’re about to borrow for instance on a 30-year note to build a parking garage, maybe you need to take account of, as best you can, what kind of vehicles are going to be even using those kinds of facilities 20, 25 years from now,” said Straus, who participated in Wednesday’s panel discussion.

If new signage is required to make autonomous vehicles function properly, policymakers should consider recouping some of the cost of that infrastructure, Straus said.

“If the public has invested in creating these navigation landmarks, perhaps in return for licensing the use of or allowing the use of these technologies on our roads there should be in effect a fee – a tiny fee, but something that says, ‘We’re helping develop this technology by making the roadways available for safe navigation purposes,’“ Straus told the News Service.

The Mattapoisett Democrat said his committee is actively working on legislation to address some of the nearer-term considerations posed by autonomous vehicle technology, which is already being tested on Bay State roadways.

Cain said automakers such as Toyota have federal authorization to test prototype cars, but other technology companies might need authorization.

“Under existing federal law, automakers have broad authority to test prototype vehicles on public roads across the country,” Cain said. “The challenge now is that you have people who are not traditional automakers who are in this space and don’t have the benefit of that broad authority.”