The integration of the Safety dimension has been a critical requirement when developing and deploying Autonomous Vehicles (AV). While much progress has been achieved within the past years, most work has centred on providing vehicles with the ability to navigate autonomously. Safety has emerged as the major challenge. This paper proposes a reference architecture that incorporates the notion of self-safety into existing AV architectures. This architecture consists in a multi-layered control loop aimed at managing self-adaptation processes in order to ensure safety at run-time.