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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

This article make it sounds like I was right. The author just took a ride in a driverless car. Which is limited to driving in Arizona due to legal restrictions.

But to answer your question, we’d need a whole different legal framework about liability for driverless cars instead of technological restrictions.

Like for example, the law ~says~ would say “one person must be designated as legally liable for the vehicle” and that’s it. Drive your driverless car on any road you want. If it hits someone, the designated person is liable.

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The designer of the software should be liable for bugs that cause life and property damages. This makes sense morally, and the costs incurred from damages should be factored into the costs of pricing a driverless car.

This protects the consumer from being responsible for damages they have no control over, provides meaningful competitive incentives for driverless car manufacturers to improve safety, and doesn’t hamstring the industry’s development.

Should the driver not incur some responsibility for putting on the road a car that is known to be worse than a human driver in many situations?

Why would anyone buy a car where they can be held liable for the software defects of the manufacturer? The driver has no control over the software and cannot compensate for it. You're blaming them for putting the thing on the road at all, and the end result would be not to bother.

While I personally wouldn’t that doesn’t stop a bunch of people from kicking their feet up and texting as their Model S’s drive them down 280 every morning. They’re already agreeing to the trade off between convenience and liability. I think you underestimate how much some people value the convenience.

That some idiots may misuse their vehicle assistive driving system is different from you having to sign an agreement when you purchase your self-driving car in which you agree to hold the manufacturer harmless and accept full responsibility for [long list of things] that may happen during autonomous operation.

I think there's a difference between agreeing to hold the manufacturer harmless for anything that happens and accepting basic liability for purchasing the car and putting it on the road.

I guess jedberg's idea is that there needs to be a place for the buck to start, as it were, wherever it might end up. Currently that is the driver. However, I don't see why it couldn't start with the manufacturer. They could always try to shift blame to the owner if they were misusing it somehow or interfering with its correct operation.

Why would anyone buy a dog where they can be held liable for the genetic disposition of its parents?

The dog has a degree of autonomy or self-agency, and can make decisions that put its owner at legal risk. Someone else brought it into the world, but you, ultimately, made the purchase.

You made it yours, the problem’s on you.

I’m not sure if it’s as black and white as that.

Continuing the counter argument: who is liable if the phone you bought with faulty battery explodes causing life and property damage?

This is a terrible analogy from every conceivable angle.

Dog owners have physical and (some) psychological control over their dogs. Not true of SDCs.

Dogs are not programmed, they're bred.

Even very dangerous dogs can be kept in a way that renders them unable to harm anyone. Not true of a car that must drive around in public.

No breeder guarantees a dog's behavior for its lifetime. SDC manufacturers will guarantee the car's ability to drive.

I think a better comparison would be if the passenger in a taxi had to pay the taxi driver's speeding tickets.

Which is why our dog can cause up to 5 million in damages and they would be payed by our dog liability insurance...

I don't see it as being a great idea, but if it was written like that the answer is simply insurance.

Actually the article states that the driverless rides are limited to a subset of the total Waymo test area in Phoenix, which has nothing to do with legal restrictions but with how confident Waymo is in their technology. And, yes, some (maybe a big) part of Waymo being in Phoenix is the regulatory environment, but I bet a lot is also that there is no snow and other challenging weather conditions.

The manufacturer of the car/software must be responsible for any accidents is causes. There is no other way.

Why? Car manufacturers are usually indemnified when someone uses their car improperly. It’s not so black and white. That’s why we need laws to spell it out.

With self driving cars, the only entity who "uses" the car is its software.

The owner/user isn't in charge of any of its actions, and can therefore not be help responsible for them.

Can you point me to that law? Do 'legal persons' qualify?

No I’m saying that is the law I would write. It doesn’t exist.

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