

Motor Mouth: Who’s liable when a self-driving car crashes? - pwg
http://driving.ca/auto-news/news/motor-mouth-whos-liable-when-a-self-driving-car-crashes/

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a3n
The manufacturers. They have to be. They're selling you something with the
very strong implication and expectation that you don't have to pay attention,
don't have to drive it. And so, many if not most people will _not_ pay
attention, despite any contract that you will undoubtedly sign that says you
assume all responsibility.

If manufacturers are not held primarily responsible then they have no
incentive to get these things as right as possible; they'll only need to get
them "Pinto right."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ford_Motor_Company#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ford_Motor_Company#Ford_Pinto)

And if they're not held primarily responsible, then that means you have to
constantly pay attention, react in less than a heartbeat to take control and
avoid an accident that _you_ by law and definition are responsible for. It
would be worse than mounting a DVD on the dashboard and watching while
driving, worse than DUI.

And now, why are we excited about these things again? So we can read in our
cars on the way to work? How irresponsible. And if you can't read while
riding, then how wasteful.

EDIT: Watch for when these things begin to be marketed near-mainstream, and
the industry calls them something other than "autonomous."

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Planar
Mainstream marketing has already happened. Look closely at commercials for
"active safety", "lane departure prevention", "collision prevention
assistance", "lateral collision avoidance". They are phrased around the event
that is _prevented_ (lane departure, forward collision, lateral collision),
not the mechanism of prevention (autonomous steering, autonomous braking).

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Planar
>> "... you, the driver, will have to be ready to take over should its
operating system go all Microsoft 'blue screen of death' on you."

Driver re-engagement is a major problem we[1] are running into. Until cars can
be fully autonomous on all roads (say 2025), the driver must keep the driver
ready to re-engage as necessary. If the car sees (vision or radar) a problem
at 200m that it doesn't want to handle autonomously, it has only a few seconds
to get you to put down your tablet/coffee and take the wheel. Mercedes and
Audi[2] are currently (2014 models) handling this by making you keep your
hands physically on the wheel.

>> "...the head spins at the thought of being legally responsible for a car
you’re not actually in..."

If your house explodes in your absence because you left the oven on, it's your
fault. My uneducated guess it that you might see legal indemnity enacted or a
variation on some U.S. states' "no-fault" laws.

>> "... if we want our cars to drive themselves ... you will never be
exceeding 100 kilometres an hour again."

I repeatedly encounter this argument against self-driving cars: they will obey
the law. If you want the legal speed limit to be higher, raise the limit.

>> "Why then, if autonomous cars offer little unchaining from everyday
driving, are automakers pushing them so hard?"

Automakers make what they think people will buy. They see lots of valuable
man-hours spent driving, hours partially recoverable by companies and
individuals if the car is self-driving. Governments are pushing it because
millions of people are dying annually. (WHO predicts 3% of fatalities will be
automotive in 2030.) U.S. seems to be playing catch-up; EuroNCAP has a roadmap
to require more autonomous safety features over the next several years to get
5-star safety rating.

[1] Automotive active safety engineers.

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7027018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7027018)

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curiouscats
While I agree we need to come up with an answer within the context of our
legal system, I really see the bigger problem as the false responsibility
claims our legal system encourages.

Many times there are negative results that should not result in wasteful legal
proceedings but our system is so focused on pining the blame on someone to
write a check that it accepts blaming x person because there isn't anyone else
to blame. Often that is a bad outcome. I would welcome us examining the
assumptions about everything needing to be blamed on specific parties.

I do agree there is a benefit to accessing pentalites to culpable parties. I
think our current system needs to accept that complex systems often have bad
results that should not be handled the way we do now.

The whole issue is very complex but I think there is a need for much better
decisions about blame being made in our legal system. It requires much more
understanding of science, engineering, statistics etc.. And less overly
simplistic blaming based on over simplified models.

My father was a professor of statistics/industrial engineering/chemical
engineering and worked some trying to get a better understanding of cause and
effect into the legal system decades ago, for example
[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.1983.104...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.1983.10483147#.Us90gPbxRBk)
I think we need to do much better in this area.

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f3llowtraveler
As long as all cars involved in a crash are insured, then the insurance
companies can split the cost equally. If any additional liability can be
pinned on one car or another, or one manufacturer or another, then they can
pay additional costs proportional to that liability. In any case, the number
of deaths, claims, and the cost of insurance will be much lower than it is
today so likely few will have any complaints.

