Would be great to see a similar national viewpoint on liability issues with SDCs. For example, who is liable (the car owner? manufacturer? algo writer?)
algo writer should not be liable, unless it's gross negligence or conscious cover up (like VW cases).
However, i can imagine a set of guideliness adopted into industry which involves slow rollouts of updates (potentially in a multivariate testing manner controlling for speed variance/distribution, response time, collision proximity (?) or collisions avoided, distance traveled, user comfort score, and so on. In other words, due diligence must be done, before rolling out new releases.
Your response makes sense, but that is usually not how the legal system works...i'm curious if all sorts of tangentially or abstractly related parties will be pulled into many lawsuits and then promptly dropped. No ultimate impact w/r/t/ judgements, but a lot of wasted time and legal defense costs.
For self driving taxis, the car owner, manufacturer and algo writer might all be the same company (e.g. Alphabet). And a company that huge can just self-insure, especially since they have more data on the risk level of their cars than anyone else.
If my self driving Subaru causes an accident, I think Subaru will pay for the damages. And Subaru doesn't need to involve an insurance company in that transaction.
Volvo have already made it clear that they will take responsibility for incidents caused by autonomous Volvos. I presume that this is at least partly a marketing tool because I would certainly prefer a clear commitment on the part of the manufacturer of any autonomous car that I might buy.
Don't worry, you'll sign a piece of paperwork that says you are solely responsible for the operation of the vehicle when you take ownership of it. You'll also sign a place where you also agree to mandatory arbitration.
I have no idea what Subaru's reaction would be, but in general you can certainly be held responsible if you allow a bug in self-driving software to cause an accident.
The manufacturer simply has to state that while the software is in control and you are sitting idle, you must continue to pay attention and re-take control if anything goes awry.
In the event of an accident, the manufacturer can then state that the accident would not have occurred if the driver had maintained control as the T&Cs demanded and wash their hands of responsibility in some PR friendly way.
Then it is not a self-driving car. There's definitely a point where cars will be nominally just assistive driving under some set of circumstances but people won't pay attention because they normally don't need to.
This is one of the things that will need to be worked out as the tech gets better over time. Liability is a big deal. If the car is billed as fully self-driving, the driver really can't be held responsible (both criminally and civilly) if their car runs over someone. (And it will.)
I really hope we just skip over that and go straight from 0 to completely self driving. It creates all sorts of messier legal tangles when it could be either the human or the car's fault, instead of making it entirely the car's fault.
Which insurance company, under whose policy? That's the question. It makes a big difference to the people involved, because it affects the policies they buy and how much they cost.
An insurance company would likely offer to cover all self driving accidents for free. This is because it would be a small cost to them, and would encourage you to use the self driving mode more often, which would cause you to get in less accidents.
Why WOULDN'T an insurance company cover all this stuff for free? It literally would save them billions.
That is not quite how it works in most US states. Insurance companies cover up to a maximum amount, which is usually enough to cover all damages. However, when the maximum amount is breached, the cost is then bourne by some party which "caused" the accident. Suppose the "driver" of the SDC isnt even driving -- who is that other party? The manufacturer? The algo writer?
As with everything in life it depends. Where did the error occur? Did the brakes fail? MFG of the car. Did the software fail to register the red light? Software MFG. I'm confident regardless of circumstances they can find who is at fault, and worst case scenario of multiple parties at fault - place an appropriate percentage of blame. You know... just like with ever other lawsuit dating back to the beginning of our justice system.
Or what if the insurance company just offers to pay for all of it for free?
It would save the insurance companies billions of dollars to do this, as it would encourage their drivers to stay in self driving mode which will be way safer.
I wonder if potential changes to minimum required liability amounts will lead to higher insurance premiums vs lower? When it's a person's actions responsible for the accident it seems easier to cap these at a lower standard amount vs. a corporation's IP's actions/fault with x-billion in assets...
Compensatory damage amounts are generally independent of the defendant's means. This is as expected. Your hospital bills and pain/suffering aren't any different if the person whose car ran you over is rich or poor.
Punitive damages are another story, but in theory they're not available in cases of ordinary negligence.
