Driverless cars immune from traffic tickets in California under current laws
nbcnews.com
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This is all well and good when the owner is Waymo or Cruise and actually has direct control over the code that caused the vehicle to fail, but for consumer cars it brings up important questions of what "ownership" even means these days.
Let's say I own a self-driving car that's able to reliably park itself. I pay close attention the first few months to make sure that it's safe and reliable, and once it's proved itself I start trusting it. I've been as careful as can reasonably be expected, but one day the manufacturer pushes a mandatory, automatic over-the-air update that contains a critical bug, and my car suddenly starts misbehaving and I get ticketed.
This isn't an unlikely scenario—how many of us have "owned" a product that has suddenly changed its behavior in undesirable ways after we purchased it? It doesn't seem reasonable to me to hold an individual consumer liable for bugs in a machine that they are unable to fully control.
Either manufacturers need to be required to provide important software freedoms to vehicle owners, or the manufacturers themselves need to be liable for infractions.
Perhaps there is something we can do before the, nearly obvious, harm occurs.
That context was easier to see when this thread started.
The "nearly obvious" was referring to things already mentioned, which I also think are obvious but many others don't.
They chose to buy it. Manufacturers should also be potentially liable for some classes of problem, but consumers are the ones pressing the "run the self-driving car" button. The court system exists to apportion liability properly past that.
To be totally clear: I want a regulatory regime for this stuff such that it is safe-as-possible and not predicated on a human's attention not wandering in the way that a human's attention is going to very understandably wander. Without one, consumers need to not buy it on pain of their own significant liability.
The manufacturer then changed those characteristics.
If a manufacturer makes changes post purchase to a product resulting in harm, they should bear the majority of the liability, if not all of it.
If I had a microwave that for years cooked a potato in 3 minutes safely, but then was modified by an update to catch fire under the same conditions, I shouldn't be the one on the hook for pushing that button.
No, absolutely not, never ever. This just highly incentivizes Manufacturers to dump trash garbage into the market (since you've just forced consumers to bear all liability for Manufacturer failures).
You do this once, and you might as well kiss all of society away. Imagine a toy that kills children, and you tell parents, "well, you pressed the 'On' button, so it's your fault". Imagine a furnace that burns down your house, and you tell homeowners, "well, you pressed the 'heat' button, what did you expect?". No one would be willing to buy anything at all, because every manufacturer would be in a race to see the shittiest thing they could trick people into buying. Every product on every shelf would be snake oil.
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Manufacturers should always be fully liable for any and all problems, that can not be directly attributed to extreme gross negligence on the consumers part.
"wel, consumers are the ones pressing the "run the self-driving car" button" -- absolutely not. Manufacturers sold car with a "self-driving" button, consumers hold zero fault for pressing the button Manufacturers promised would work, unless there's some kind of extreme gross negligence involved. (i.e., pressing the button, while the car is already dangling off a cliff-side, or pressing the button after gouging out every camera and sensor on the car, or whatever).
"But then Manufacturers couldn't sell a self-driving car" -- cool, then the car isn't ready to be sold anyway. If a car company isn't ready to take on the liability for their self-driving product, then it isn't freaking ready for the road -- no exceptions.
You're totally right! This is why we have in the past had a regulatory (and partial participatory) state that, prior to decades of attacks and gutting, prevented that stuff from being sold. Perhaps the self-driving car hypemen need their own equivalent of UL/ETL and need to convince insurers and the NHTSA that they have a sufficient story--and perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to sell cars that sport those features at all until they do!
Our regulatory state drives up the cost of housing in numerous ways (zoning, arc-fault breakers, "look and feel", etc). Children don't hardly see their parents because they must drive long distances to commute, they don't get adequate supervision.
Our culture is what allows this to continue. We culturally don't demand excellence. We denigrate smart people. We refuse to have standards for raising children, leading to inter-generational idiocy. And now those idiots vote to keep making more idiots ("don't say gay", anti-abortion, no free BC, etc.) Regulation won't fix a broken culture.
That's fine. Regulation's "job" isn't to "fix a broken culture", it exists to prevent repeat mistakes -- especially risky/damaging ones. The saying goes, "safety regulations are written in blood" -- that most of the regulations we have exist to prevent some kind of tragedy that has already happened at least once.
> Our regulatory state drives up the cost of housing in numerous ways ("look and feel", etc).
Most of those are not regulations, they're just rules. (i.e., 'neighborhood character / look and feel').
> Our regulatory state drives up the cost of housing (arc-fault breakers)
That's not a 'cost drive-up', that's basic safety. (AFCI breakers literally prevent home electrical fires, Home Depot sells these at full retail markup for like ~$50/each. (120v,15a). You might use, what 12 of these on the average home? $600 total? On a $300k new build, AFCI costs you 0.2% of your total budget. These are not why housing is expensive).
I'd be interested in some examples, as I can't think of any offhand, despite your claim that this "isn't unlikely".
Also, when it comes to vehicles misbehaving in traffic, I'd say "harmful" is a more apt term than "undesirable".
* Microsoft Windows starts showing ads in new and creative places, even though I shelled out $200 for the Pro version.
* An Android update broke my preferred home screen.
* Roomba vacuums go through regular periods of stupidity in between software updates. One day it's able to dodge obstacles, the next it's sucking up anything and everything.
* Basically every SaaS product changes its UI on a semi-regular basis in ways that throw off existing workflows.
EDIT: Oh, and a bonus one that's more on topic—Tesla recently rushed an update to their software and introduced a lot of bugs:
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-s-holiday-update-sc...
Unlike the potential of a vehicle making driving mistakes, none of your examples is harmful, especially not to random third parties. The only thing on your list I have direct experience with is Windows--I've had the Pro license ever since Win 10 came out, now on three different machines, and I don't see any ads on my desktop or popping up in my file system. (of course, I don't log in to any Microsoft account, maybe that explains it).
Honestly I don't see why corporate security groups don't throw a fit over what Microsoft has been doing the last few years. I'd expect the enterprise versions to be almost like Windows 2000 with all of the malware off by default (and possibly impossible to turn on).
I have never seen any corporate security group that does its own thinking instead of rubber-stamping whatever Microsoft tells them.
And the current Windows privacy terms grant MS the right t upload to their servers anything from the disk or memory of your computer. So they already maximized the untrustworthiness here. We can stop expecting that anybody reacts.
Windows, macOS, iOS, ipadOS, android. All try to ram updates down your throat, and make it difficult or impossible (android) to disable.
How I wish dumb TVs were still the norm.
Don’t buy it if the company who controls it does not put it in writing that they indemnify you properly.
This is a hidden two-fault scenario, which isn't always "bad engineering" but is usually a smell in that direction. You're (1) accepting that the operator/owner/whatever of the vehicle is technically responsible, (2) acknowledging that this supervision is likely to work in practice, then (3) imagining a hardware/systems failure in the car and simultaneously (4) supposing that the supervision you took for granted in (2) fails at the same time.
Basically, you don't need point 3 to make your point about safety logically. You added it to change the villain from the driver to the manufacturer.
I set up the scenario to show that no matter how careful the consumer is, their supervision will not work in practice (since the vehicle's behavior can change at any time and without warning) and therefore they cannot be held responsible for the behavior of the vehicle.
Either the manufacturer should not be allowed to market it (because it cannot be operated safely) or the manufacturer should be considered the operator.
Sorry, can you explain that better? The whole point to the metaphor of "supervision" (e.g. of party A by party B) is that party A is not trusted to behave correctly in all circumstances. You seem to be saying that supervision can only work if B is never required to intervene at all (and by extension, won't, if A's behavior changes)? In which case there's no supervision happening, right?
Again, it really seems like you're just playing tricks to make the manufacturer into an unsolvable villain. I mean, you get that's ridiculous right? We trust our cars not to fail already. And have, for a century. And sometimes they do fail, and when that happens we adjust regulatory strategies to minimize risk. Why is any of that different when there's a scary robot involved?
But my 1971 Buick is almost exactly the same as it was. There are no sudden changes.
When the operator doesn't have full Agency of their hardware, can they be held accountable for it's unexpected behavior?
Yes? Because that's what "supervision" means? Again, I'm very much not following your logic.
The whole idea behind supervised autonomy[1] is that the device may not behave correctly. Period. If you aren't capable of supervising your car after an update you clearly weren't doing any supervision before the update.
[1] Or supervised anything! Would you argue against holding parents accountable for childproofing their homes just because their kids got an "update" and learned to walk? Again I really don't think you're thinking this through.
Or, owners should enter into a pre-existing legal relationship with the manufacturer to get reimbursed for any manufacturer error that gets pushed out.
Those who choose to operate driverless vehicles must have some skin in the game in order for this to be fair at all. Bringing your driverless vehicle into an area is the customer's choice, after all.
I think most people will eventually want the manufacturer to be the defendant in court cases that result from crashes due to a manufacturer updating cars. I can only imagine NHTSA (US Auto Regulator) will evolve to make this the case.
The likes of Musk will moan and bitch about it, but regulation is a perfectly good solution for this.
My point is that operators must bear some of the responsibility for their operation of these vehicles.
I think there may be some optimization steps here.
FOSS robot cars seem like a great way to bypass emissions controls, safety regulations, and plain common sense. It'd take what, half a day, for some teenager to modify the firmware to double the 0-60 and blow up the battery pack at the same time?
I'd want the opposite: for self-driving firmware to be locked down and hardware signed to heck, with an independent auditing body code-reviewing every update.
> or the manufacturers themselves need to be liable for infractions.
Can't it be both? Split legal responsibility between each consumer and manufacturer. Doesn't have to be 50/50, but personal liability (even capped at a few grand) could make people pay attention and take over when the self-driving doesn't seem to be doing its job. We don't need more drivers on the roads who think their wondercars are infallible and blame everyone else for their accidents.
Do you think it would be possible (and desirable) to split liability, or should it remain solely the manufacturer's?
If the regulators step in to remove the vehicles from the road then who makes the consumers whole now that their vehicle, and perhaps livelihood, is gone?
I suspect certification is the only reasonable path. If the regulators believe these systems are safe for the road then they should build the framework for establishing that bar. If such a framework is not possible to build then I think that also answers that question.
this is basically why the NHTSA told car manufacturers not to obey Massachusetts' Right to Repair laws.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/06/14/federal-highway-traffic...
generally we don't pen laws in order to save a singular idiot teenager -- more-so the aforementioned teenager bought a product and then ruined it; the teenager already received the punishment for his actions by the destruction of their own property without the need for jurisprudence and complexity.
Also : Nearly every major car manufacturer in the world has been caught semi-recently violating emissions standards. Some have violated safety standards. Given that this hasn't been an impasse for the worlds largest companies, why presume that the FOSS equivalents would be worse? Our regulations have failed to constrain the largest companies who are apparently beholden to the most regulation and law the world has ever seen, but somehow FOSS individuals/collectives need to do better than these billion dollar behemoths? Nice.
I don't get why people suddenly think that when something is 'dangerous' then it's okay to throw in the towel on personal property ownership and take whatever lend-lease-borrow program is offered in exchange. Cars have always been dangerous, and aside from gross safety and emissions laws, we're allowed to modify them.
I don't understand why this changes radically when a vehicle becomes electric, were gas tanks and high pressure fuel injectors suddenly safer than I remember them being? "The stupid teen who burns his house down" certainly applied to things in the past, and we didn't go out of the way to lock down the fuel tank into an inaccessible black box in response, we just dealt with the inherent risk of dangerous equipment and somehow avoided full-blown chaos and calamity through educated precaution and training.
Here's what I want: I want the freedom to modify my own property, and when that modification becomes in violation of an agreed upon law I should be punished.
Forget all this pre-crime 'what-if' save the children bullshit. Punish offenders and let civilian non-offenders do as they please until such time that they violate a law or standard -- which would be more enforcement than the world is seemingly applying to every other car manufacturer in the world.
That’s not what’s changing. We’d be having the same balancing act discussion of collective safety versus individual rights if self-driving cars were all combustion powered.
> Cars have always been dangerous, and aside from gross safety and emissions laws, we're allowed to modify them.
These statements are inherently ignoring the externalities that the dangers pose to others on the roads and streets. For years we’ve allowed people to essentially modify their cars however they want, we’re allowing car companies to build vehicles that are literally killing people on the streets with little action to prevent it.
This status quo is really bad and we should fix it. People should not be allowed to drive lifted vehicles on urban streets. If modifying your car was only something that negatively impacted the owner, that would be fine. But the fact is that modifying cars tends to make them more dangerous to others on the street, not just the occupants of the car. We need more safety controls on car companies, not less. We need cars to have automatic speed controls that limit them to the speed limit on the street.
This isn’t a debate about if people should be allowed to modify their equipment, but if they do, they shouldn’t be allowed to drive that on public roads. Take it to the track or some off-roading specific place, not our public streets where we’re now seeing the highest pedestrian death rates in the last 40 years.
No, they don't. We don't ban alcohol or cars because of drunk drivers. We don't even require a breathlyzer reading before cars start.
Instead, we try to discourage that behavior with education and penalties. We penalize drunk drivers after they harm other road users or we try to catch them beforehand based on driving irregularities.
I do suspect we will see restrictions on what software can be run on cars. I hope those restrictions allow open source solutions to be viable. Ideally there would be a cost effective federal system of safety approval for any release of self driving software and we'll allow users to run any approved system on publix roads so that ownership of devices isn't lost. Unfortunately I think regulatory capture makes a positive outcome here unlikely.
Actually we do for repeat offenders. On top of that there is active discussion of having car companies detect if someone is impaired before driving.
Driving is not a right, it’s a privilege, and far too many people abuse that privilege.
> we try to discourage that behavior with education and penalties.
Try is the operative word here, we try and we fail because there isn’t enough enforcement on our streets.
Hasn't that always been possible? Just because it's in software now I don't see why it's suddenly different
People already mod their cars, and there are vast communities of teens and early-twenties following exhaustive video tutorials on how to illegally and unsafely make their car faster and louder. Cars aren't quite FOSS, but they're better documented than most FOSS is.
If buying the hardware is even an option to begin with, there's going to be a hefty fee to subscribe to the required 'cloud based' self-driving service.
(And there's certainly no way individuals/small businesses will be able to buy such a car and run a self-driving taxi service profitably when a megacorporation could have all the income from all the cars)
Positive HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36927971
I think the argument is that we won't see the same availability beyond level 3, since level 4 is the first step where a human is not required behind the wheel. This means you probably need subscription to have a remote human who can step in and take control in edge cases, at least until we develop AGI. Even then, I suspect the economics of running a full AGI from each vehicles will make a subscription mandatory.
But I believe regulatory capture and anti-competitive tariffs are likely to make affordable, buy-and-use cars impossible to sell in the US. Regulations will likely change annually, like they do for cars right now. The govt will be worried that China has control of our morning commute.
I hate being cynical, but cars do seem like a lost cause.
Even well before some such future, the type of people who buy Bugatti Veyron will still want to buy something unique and out of reach of the 99.99% of the population. Maybe that is human driven but what if human driven becomes illegal?
But the reality is that people do own cars, and no car manufacturer that I know is also trying to become a taxi operator (except maybe in the indirect investment sense). Or in other words: sales in a market aren't affected by the abstract possibility of vertical integration, because any entity that attempts to vertically integrate will be undercut by other parties making sales at the same time.
Cars were hardware. But now contain ever-increasing amounts of software. With self-driving cars, the software is the main feature.
The development cost of the updates and patches has to come from somewhere - either significantly marking up the initial purchase cost to fund the on going development (side bit: when a one time purchase server shuts down people are up in arms about that) or with some form of subscription model.
If a driverless car maker can be liable for the software that they released some time ago and didn't update, then the funding of that development effort has to come from somewhere.
If some of the compute or data updates is in the cloud, that comes with an ongoing cost. Compare with getting a DVD with a database of road updates once a year ( https://ford.navigation.com/product/Catalog/2023-Green-DVD-M... ) and the "this road is closed" ( https://www.wyoroad.info/pls/Browse/WRR.STATIC5?SelectedDist... ) or "there is heavy traffic, a different route is suggested" services. Those come with an ongoing cost somewhere.
SaaS is the plague on software development, because the subscription model demands a shift to constant feature "upgrades" and other frequently-useless "updates" intended to justify the perpetual subscription costs to customers.
Car makers operating according to this incentive will try to discourage taxi-like functions in self-driving cars, perhaps by only allowing operation when specified people are recognized by the car (anti-theft feature!).
The same rule should extend to self-driving cars. The manufacturer is driving, ergo they should be liable for everything the car does.
Mercedes’s approach to self-driving feels the most promising here. Afaik they are so far the only manufacturer who has said “we’re driving, we’ll take the liability” – https://insideevs.com/news/575160/mercedes-accepts-legal-res...
1) making owners of cars responsible for (most) traffic infractions
2) issues caused by third parties, with the first party bearing initial liability
Number 1 is surprisingly common in overseas countries. Some of those countries have figured that your garden variety traffic fines clog up the courts, so they’ve lifted simple garden variety infractions out of criminal law and placed them in administrative law.
In doing so, they’ve made the owner of the car (i.e., license plate holder) responsible for these types of traffic infractions, who then receive their fines by mail (which are technically settlement offers to avoid prosecution) with a generous appeal window, after which the fine is finalized (doesn’t end up on criminal record because it’s not criminal anymore).
This frees up court resources, allows for ticketing without stops, and shifts responsibility to the car's owner, who then, if applicable, can settle it with whomever they borrow their car to.
For more severe infractions, it’s still tied to the driver, with the car owner being the initial presumptive driver.
Number 2 is a common situation in the US and overseas and is resolved by going after whoever is responsible (e.g., manufacturer) after the fact to be made whole again. It’s similar to going after the seller of the stolen goods after the original owner takes back their property from you in jurisdictions where property rights don’t transfer after stolen goods are sold.
Many "garden variety infractions" are human errors. I do not think those were ever a subject to criminal prosecution disregarding whether the ability to clog the courts.
Elsewhere, they also used to be part of the criminal system and handled similarly to how it’s dealt with in the US (minus the more severe tools the criminal justice system has on hand).
the best of capitalism will definitely happen.
But this is very easy. The self-driving is a component, same as brakes or lights. If your brakes stop working because of manufacturing issue and you crash into something it's the manufacturer's fault. Nothing new here.
> Exam invalidated over... Facetime emojis??? > https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/18p8uub/...
Driverless cars don't seem to be programmed to break laws in the first place. They're incapable of making a choice to break laws to save time. They're simply programmed not to speed, not to run through red lights. And when they do, it's not out of some "choice" -- it's just a bug or deficiency in their code.
Driverless cars absolutely do need to be held to safety standards. But the way to do that isn't through issuing tickets. It's simply for a governmental regulatory agency to set statistical limits for the manufacturer's software for mistakes like running a red light, and if the whole fleet of cars goes above that limit you require the software manufacturer to fix it, risking fines if they don't fix it quickly, or losing the ability to operate at all.
Issuing tickets for driverless cars makes as much sense as issuing tickets if pharmaceutical companies put the wrong amount of a drug in a pill. Tickets are for individuals who make choices; safety regulations with fines and revoking licenses are for corporations and things like driverless cars.
The benefit is that ticketing is the administrative mechanism we already have so we can use that to aggregate and judge performance.
Fine the owner of the self-driving car enough and she will sell it and never buy from this company again. Fine enough owners and the company is broke.
Similarly, we do not punish the Coca-Colas of the world for pumping out fossil-fuel based plastic packaging by a ton, but countries do increasingly enforce consumer recycling (with penalties).
Not saying it’s good but it is what it is.
Otherwise it feels patently unfair to human drivers, who can’t say “well, my family hasn’t broken many traffic laws recently, so I shouldn’t have to pay a ticket for just running this one red light/almost hitting this one pedestrian.
Of course this can already be an issue today, but driverless cars might tip it from being a necessary evil to just plain evil
If we are to hold the creator of self-driving systems responsible for any poor behavior of their creations (as we very well should!), then they must have both the ability to be certain that all of their deployed software and hardware is always in the intended correct working order, and the ability to perform fixes and updates on demand of either themselves or some regulating agency.
Therefore, it seems pointless for it to ever be possible for an individual to "own" such a thing. They would inevitably be mandated to never attempt to modify the system and to accept any updates and maintenance tasks immediately on the creator's demand. So why should any reasonable individual, or banks who would have to be writing loans to those individuals, want to own such a thing when they have so little control over it and so many liabilities?
Consider a situation like - the car has 6 laser/lidar sensors. It is designed to continue operating as well as possible if one of them malfunctions. If one of them does infact malfunction, who is responsible for deciding when to replace it and paying for such service? If you truly own such a vehicle, wouldn't you be the one paying for it? And if you're paying for it, how could you not be the one deciding exactly when it happens? So then inevitably some people would put it off as long as possible and have the vehicle operating in a degraded condition. Maybe it could try to refuse to operate until serviced, but when? Maybe when you're out of town somewhere, or when you have an important meeting to make it to later?
Liability, even conditional, for the end user doesn't seem like a very good solution either. Is it really a good system for every unfortunate incident to become a legal battle between an individual owner and what would necessarily be a gigantic mega-corporation with a fat legal budget for who is really responsible? Yeah, no.
So I think I just proved that self-driving cars pretty much always have to be operated as a taxi-like system as Waymo etc currently do. Lidar sensor breaks? Not my problem, the service needs to send another one, no matter what the location - it can't go to any location it couldn't send a replacement to anyways. If there's any problems, there's always a clear party responsible - a giant wealthy mega-corp that is very easy to regulate and fine and capable of fixing the whole fleet fast.
Am I missing something here? Maybe, but I don't see it right now.
I for one do not buy the argument that the intent to break the law is not there. To understand why this is the case: imagine a really fast self driving car that enters the runway at an airport. It speeds up as it attempts to take off. It does not take off and in the process - best case - causes delay for everyone using the airport. Now, I could argue that this car is a plane and it was in fact NOT programmed to NOT take off. Therefore everything is good.
In my opinion: self-driving cars do not belong on the road unless there are real consequences to their screw ups. Right now it's a beta test where you might just lose your life and nobody is going to be held accountable.
I'm not liable for a traffic ticket when I get in a taxi or on a bus and the driver does something wrong. In a driverless system, the "driver" is the manufacturer, or whoever wrote and updates the self-driving software.
But this also needs to come with some regulation. Driverless mode needs to be audited and certified against a standard, by a third party. Similar (in spirit, anyway) to how human drivers take a driving test before being issued a license.
I can't wait until the selfishness of humans is no longer a factor when it comes to road safety.
waymo can also take way tighter gaps that most humans would find dangerous, it’s really just not that consistent yet.
The turn indicators use PWM'ed LEDs and can be invisible in daylight with fast enough shutter speed on the camera.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/18myjc6/dr...
Also, under what circumstances/edge-cases should speed limits and traffic laws should be breakable by an autonomous system?
a. If you were someone bleeding out to death and need to get to a hospital, do you honestly want it to complete to complete stop like a Canadian Mormon nerd at every stop sign rather than be the most aggressive NYC cab driver-meets-ludicrous speed safe-ish enough so you don't die?
b. Evading someone believed intending on causing great bodily harm to reach a safe place like a police station?
c. Following a vehicle containing a kidnapping or human trafficking victim?
d. Commandeering by a LEO in active pursuit of a dangerous suspect?
e. Fleeing an incoming regional disaster threat?
It is probable to likely that, by over-regulation, untold numbers of preventable deaths, injuries, suffering, and property damage will be incurred by vehicles created by corporations to always follow laws blindly rather than spend additional money to handle edge-cases or allow exceptions.
The ticket was $100 and I could appeal it by paying $175 of which $100 would be refunded if my appeal was in my favor.
Their city ordinance said I was responsible because I owned the car.
I imagine it’s the same for driverless cars. The registered owner will get and pay the ticket. They don’t care who is driving.
An interesting question though is they driverless cars should probably have different speed limits as they can respond very differently from humans.
"human subject mass experiment", "consent"?
No, she's wrong there -that's the past. For the past 4 years mass experimentation is fine. Just do it!
Another government incentive, to help usher in further loss of personal autonomy - appeal to greed version.