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Comment by davidkuhta | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone with some legal background comment on liability implications?

IANAL, but it seems straightforward to me. The vehicle will have to be fully insured. While this is a strange concept in America, where each driver is insured for a specific vehicle, this is how insurance is done in many countries in Europe; an insured vehicle is insured no matter who drives it. So American insurance companies will just need to start insuring vehicles by themselves, and if something happens then the insurance company will pay up.

But is not only about the money, humans can lose their freedom from major accidents, what if you get a bad update or bad sensors and your car kills some people, some engineers or managers should have to pay if they did something wrong and not point to the insurance company.

I do not want some manager to think something like "don't worry about that bug, it is very rare so insurance will cover us in case something bad happens, we need to push the update now"

> But is not only about the money, humans can lose their freedom from major accidents, what if you get a bad update or bad sensors and your car kills some people, some engineers or managers should have to pay if they did something wrong and not point to the insurance company.

Software automation has already happened in other areas. If the bug was introduced on purpose or if there was insufficient oversight/negligence, people can go to jail. Not not any error automatically is a crime. If you kill someone with your car that doesn't mean that you'll be charged even if the accident was your fault.

I understand but is there something in place to handle this issue, you would need people that will analyze the car software, the updates, the practices and decide who is responsible, my question is there something in place or we need to wait for this laws to appear ?

Right. How many people will be horribly injured or die in ‘the incident’ that leads to the lawsuit that gets these companies to take this stuff seriously.

> some engineers or managers should have to pay if they did something wrong and not point to the insurance company

That's already how insurance works. You pay by paying for insurance premiums. Why do you think people shouldn't be allowed to use insurance to cover accidents in just this situation?

Say the manager knows about a bug in the AI but it consider that is more expensive to wait and properly fix it then push an update with the bug present. Should the decision of fixing or not a bug that can cause lives be influenced only by how much will insurance cost?

I am not arguing that a person should pay with his freedom for a mistake, people do mistake, I am afraid that the bad behavior from software industry will apply to self driving cars, the move fast and brake things mentality,ship with known bugs etc.

> Should the decision of fixing or not a bug that can cause lives be influenced only by how much will insurance cost?

But the price of the insurance takes into account the risk of a bug costing a life. They know if they make riskier decisions their insurance premiums will go up.

Insurance doesn't magically remove costs. It just amortises them. Loss adjusters have been experts at this for centuries.

>But the price of the insurance takes into account the risk of a bug costing a life.

The possible problem is who sets this price for a life, it needs to be high enough but not absurd.

But this isn't a new problem at all. Loss adjusters have already been doing this for many industries where someone can be killed. Insurance for normal cars already does it even! Why are self-driving cars any different?

I am sorry I am not that good with financial business practice (I was raised to avoid them and never trust the banks or similar institutions, I am not from US)

It is an interesting point how would an insurance company calculate the risk when there is not that much real data.

If an airplane crashes all similar airplanes won't fly until the cause of the crash will be found and fixed in all the affected airplanes. I want similar responsibility from cars.

I see how easy they get approved to test self driving cars without the citizens having to vote if they should be test subjects and I am worried that this companies have a powerful lobby and that the rules and laws won't be fair for the citizens.

Other thing that worries me is that you allow self driving cars without a radar or any sensor that can detect a front collision, this also feels as letting companies to test their software on the expense of people lives.

This are my opinions, I hope you can understand what some people like me think about this situation and why we think that this is something new that needs good and fair laws and rules for the citizens.

"Move fast and brake things"? Hmm...we're about to see this x100, methinks: a Therac for our generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle... (TL;DR: spaghetti code also kills people)

Ok, that's financial liability. What about criminal liability? What if the car breaks rules and kills someone. Will the programmers be responsible? The CEO? Can companies be criminally convicted in the US? Or will it be on par with other "machine accidents", where there is typically no criminal responsibility?

I don't understand this obsession with finding someone to hold responsible for an accident before the accident happens. When an accident with self-driving cars actually happen, if someone is found to have committed a crime, that person will be charged.

If you run a red light and kill someone, it's pretty clear who is responsible though. If a driverless car runs a red light because of a hardware defect, who is? No one? Or do you think there will be a committee trying to establish what exactly went wrong and where? With planes, when autopilot does something stupid, Boeing/Airbus will ground all planes of the same type until they can figure out what the issue is. I can't imagine we will ever hold cars to the same standard as we hold airplanes, that's just impossible.

We already have a framework in place to deal with this.

If your car's brakes fail and you run the red light because you had no way to stop, you are not at fault. Neither is the engineer that developed the braking system, unless they were criminally negligent.

If the software that runs the red light fails and gives everyone a green light and you run it and get in an accident, you are not at fault, and the person who wrote the code will not be going to jail, again unless they are found to be criminally negligent, or malicious.

If a systemic fault is found at any point, a recall will be done to remedy it.

This isn't some new class of problem here, this is the same old thing we have been dealing with for many years. You already rely on many many people doing their job correctly every day to not die, this is no different.

If your car's brakes fail, it's probably a mechanical fault due to natural wear and tear, for which it is easy to avoid assigning blame. If a car's autonomous capability spectacularly fails, it's far more likely to be due to a bug at design stage. Many of these bugs are likely to cause vehicles to behave in ways human drivers would certainly be prosecuted for, and we really haven't got a whole lot of precedent for auditing responsibility for bugs in complex software performing varied life-threatening interactions with other humans which replicates tasks humans themselves perform imperfectly and are frequently prosecuted for negligence over.

It would be a strange system which punishes humans for individual serious driving flaws but merely requires them to remedy it for introducing systematic serious driving flaws.

Sometimes, nobody should be held responsible. It's called an accident.

And if nobody is held responsible, there is no risk for a company to put shoddy software on the street.

At which point they've crossed the line into a crime, so liability is a crime. These concepts are already in play in other industries that use software on devices that could harm or kill.

good luck proving their software is defective

You mean other than, "Your vehicle software is defective and unsafe and therefore banned for public road use by NHTSA as non-conforming to federal safety standards"?

In other words... holding them responsible.

A machine that damages property or causes injury via its own ineptitude is defective, not accidental. Hitting a deer that jumps out from roadside cover is an accident. Plowing over a bicyclist in a well lit environment isn't. There is going to be a lot of the latter with self driving cars.

>> this is how insurance is done in many countries in Europe.

Not all though. For example in Poland you insure the vehicle and anyone with a valid driver licence is allowed to drive it and is fully covered. As a matter of fact it's enshrined in law that insurance companies have to provide cover no matter who drives the car, as long as there is insurance on the car.

My point was that in many European countries, Poland among them, the vehicle is insured no matter who drives it.

My post is now edited to be clearer.

Europe is moot for now anyway, due to the Vienna Convention; USA is not a signatory, so expect most development to happen there.

Strange normally insurance is tied to the person in the UK

I know, it was really strange to me when I moved to UK - what do you mean, I can't just let someone else drive my car? I have to add them to my insurance? Why?

I mean, I understand how it works now, but to me it still seems like an excuse to extract a lot more money from British drivers.

I'm not sure about that. The flip side of that is that my standard insurance insures me on my car, but I'm also insured to drive someone else's car too without further premiums required.

Well.....that's not quite true - British insurance usually covers you for driving other cars, but only gives you 3rd party insurance....so I would never risk driving someone's car unless it was some really old beater not worth much.

So an experienced driver is subsidizing young drivers

It seems reasonable to me. The risk is primarily determined by the ability of the driver, and can be gauged by their claim history and factors like age.

E.g. a 65 year old female driver with no claims and a low insurance premium. If she arbitrarily allows her 18 year old male neighbour to drive her car, the insurer would be exposed to a high risk. The only way to offset that would be to raise premiums for everyone.

How does that system account for the risk level being so much more dependent on the driver than on the car?

I does not. In fact, it explicitly assumes that the risk depends only on the car - insurance on a 500bhp car will be a lot greater than the one on a 100bhp car, even if the owner of both is a 50 year old lady with a perfect driving history. As I said - the law guarantees that the insurance cannot differentiate between drivers, so letting your 18 year old son drive your 500bhp range rover has no impact on your premium.

Tbf - it self regulates to some extent. My dad wouldn't let me drive his car, because he knew that if I crashed it he would lose all of his discounts and pay a lot more. So even though I technically could drive his car and be insured, he wouldn't let me as that was a financial risk to him.

Not my particular area of expertise, but you can probably go after everyone involved:

Operators and owners--negligence for using car without a driver, strict liability for ultra-hazardous activity

Manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and anyone who makes products available--are liable under products liability for any manufacturing defect, design defect, or failure to warn of dangers.

Potential criminal penalties for anyone involved (including engineers) if they put out cars knowing they aren't ready yet) or fake results, etc.

One thing that keeps most car accidents from going into full scale massive litigation is that the drivers causing the accidents are usually not worth that much money.

But if I'm a plaintiff lawyer and my client got killed by a Google car? I'm not asking for the 500k dollars the insurance coverage provides. I'm asking for big numbers because juries are going to make Google pay for each death.

The manufacturer is the one "driving" the vehicle so I would assume that they have all the liability. As an occupant, it's certainly in no way my responsibility if a vehicle I'm just sitting in hits a pedestrian or otherwise gets into an accident. It also looks as if there will still be a safety driver; they will just be remote vs. being in the car.

That prompts an unusual edge case for passenger liability. Idiots doing things to the vehicle as it's driving. Inevitably across a zillion miles, passengers will do everything that can be done to a vehicle. They're guaranteed to cause wrecks in the early years (even if it's extraordinarily rare), until or unless the manufacturer idiot-proofs everything in the style of the inside of a McDonald's. So does the manufacturer carry liability for the behavior of the people inside, or will that be pushed on to the passenger. I suspect it'll be a dual case scenario, the manufacturer will have to carry some passenger liability for such events, and the passenger will still be simultaneously pursued.

Damage liability remains with the vehicle owner, just like if you loan a vehicle to a friend. You don't insure your ability to drive safely; you insure the vehicle for damages to it and caused by it. Fault will likely be determined exactly how it is for a human driver.

Might be interesting to compare this to other engineering doctrines if say a bridge collapses the supervising engineer personally can get in trouble.

Do the senior engineers in these firms have professional liability insurance

I don't know how common it is, but professional liability insurance for engineers definitely exists. I expect that it's more common for consultants and others operating their own businesses than it is for employees of large companies. But there are certainly areas like construction where someone with a professional engineer license has to sign off on drawings where it may be more of a thing.

That sounds fair, you would have a software lead that will be responsible for the software, then the management can't push him around to release fast, he would make sure to follow all the rules (we would need rules if those are not there yet, maybe NASA or airplanes industry has such rules).

IANAL but I would presume the same as when a human is driving a car.

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