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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Who is liable when someone gets hit with a self driving car? It was always a joke in college how the dream was to get hit by a university bus and have your tuition paid off in a huge settlement. I'd imagine if a waymo car made its way around the more desperate parts of the bay area like the tenderloin and liability ends up shifting to huge company with billions of dollars, we might end up with a Russia sort of situation in terms of rampant insurance fraud. Maybe waymo et al will just respond by never servicing these areas, which will no doubt open an entire can of worms in the press and among the most virtuous online.

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>a russia sort of situation

in russia the rampant insurance fraud ended in everybody getting dashcams to defend themselves. waymo and cruise have way more than just a dashcam - if you can successfully commit insurance fraud while being recorded on a dozen cameras as well as lidar and infrared sensors, you probably deserve the settlement.

Set a mark, people will aim for it.

Aim, sure.

That doesn't mean enough people will hit it to matter.

The cars themselves are studded with every kind of camera and sensor you can imagine, it'd be pretty hard to pull of an insurance scam

> Who is liable when someone gets hit with a self driving car?

Short answer: in the U.S., it will depend on the facts and circumstances. Common law has many drawbacks. But organic adaptability is one of its advantages.

> Who is liable when someone gets hit with a self driving car?

While this is not exclusive of other liability, probably one or both of:

(1) The person hit, if they were breaking the law in a way which made it unreasonable to expect a driver to avoid hitting them,

(2) The manufacturer of the self-driving vehicle, under normal defective product liability principles.

The owner and/or, where different, operator of the vehicle, as well as other people in the chain of commerce may also be liable, especially when (2) applies.

I mean, any pedestrian fatality will have a full 360 lidar recording of the context. I suspect fraudulent claims could be caught pretty easily.

How would you even discern fraud from the real thing? You could just get drunk and act drunker then stumble onto the road, you'd blow wet on the breathalyzer and the story is plausible enough that a public jury will side with you, the innocent guy on a night out or the guy down on his luck, over scary robot car company, then a precedent will be set.

Isn't public intoxication against the law, as is jaywalking? What happens if the exact same situation happens today but to a normal car with a driver?

Except where there is specific law that mentions the violation of law and affects your fact pattern (e.g. stand your ground laws that require someone to be committing a crime for the law to apply to the self defense case) violating the law at the time doesn't really mean much when it comes to who pays up. The law is between you and the state. Deciding who pays up is between you and the other party.

You can't just stumble onto the highway where the normal traffic flow is well in excess of the speed limit and expect to get a payday because whoever hits you will be speeding.

That said, most of this goes out the window if you are committing a handful of crimes that society has decided exempt you from most of the protections of the legal system (terrorism, driving drunk, etc). If you are drunk and someone jumps in front of your car to commit insurance fraud it won't matter if you have 360deg 4k video of it, you will likely lose.

Who is liable now if this happened with a human driver involved? Aren't there any rules about it already?

> Who is liable when someone gets hit with a self driving car?

As is usually the case with the legal system, whoever has the least amount of political/economic power. So either the safety driver or the victim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg

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