Avoiding the Question of Who’s to Blame in Autonomous Vehicle Accidents
transportevolved.com
transportevolved.com
For criminal liability, the owner or operator of the car is subject. If you are driving an autonomous vehicle, that was your decision, and you're responsible for what it does in traffic, just as you're responsible for the car you drive today. So, no change.
If the car itself is shown to be defective, then you sue the manufacturer. Scaling up, there's class actions, and recalls. So, no change.
Easy? Maybe. Best? Absolutely not.
I don't like the idea of being punished financially because some jackass on the road won't drive correctly. Insurance companies love it because now they can raise both our rates and not bother with any kind of investigation. This doesn't mean its good for the consumer. Jackass driver loves it because he never has to reform his jackass ways. Your own link details these criticisms:
Critics of no-fault argue that dangerous drivers not paying for the damage they cause encourages excessive risky behavior, with only raised premiums and a higher risk rating as the potential consequence, and no jury awards or legal settlements. Detractors of no-fault also point out that legitimate victims with subtle handicaps find it difficult to seek recovery under no-fault. Another criticism is that some no-fault jurisdictions have among the highest automobile-insurance premiums in the country, but this may be more a matter of effect than cause (e.g., the financial savings from no-fault may simply make it more popular in areas with higher automobile-accident risk, or high insurance rates may cause more drivers to go uninsured, increasing the attraction of a no-fault system).
From a futurist perspective, I imagine there might be scenarios of people taking manual control and causing an accident or manufacturers writing bad software. Imagine if Toyota's newest update causes 10x as many crashes. Why should I subsidize their incompetence via my personal insurance premiums?
If autonomy happens, ideally, the car companies should be paying insurance. The same way they pay for warranty. Its all in their control and its an incentive to keep them honest and care about making cars that don't crash.
Even if we have a no fault insurance scheme for only unmodded autonomous cars that means the manufactures have no incentives to make their cars safer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
I imagine there are many personality types who only behave because it would cost them too much to misbehave. My gut feeling is that this is probably 80% of the population.
If you think about that, that hardly even makes sense. "Incompetence" has been a perfectly normal part of the insurance package for a long time. I assure you measurable amounts of what you've paid in insurance have already gone to "incompetence".
Once you do tell them you've altered the programming on the cars computer they are more than likely to tell you to find someone else crazy enough to insure you.
The self drive feature of a car is about to get very proprietary, like a flight system there is going to be assurances that the software the manufacturer installed is the same one that's running. Crash investigators are going to have a tonne of information from these cars (Assuming they don't blow up in a Michael Bay style crash).
Use of self driving cars hockeysticks-># of human drivers plummets->premiums skyrocket for remaining human drivers.
It also might work out that self driving vehicles end up reducing the rates for human drivers. I think a lot of road risk actually comes from a small pool of drivers, who will tend to be the most eager to stop insuring themselves. So even if if the pool of human drivers shrinks a lot, the risk involved could lead to lower rates than we see today.
[0] http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/DOT-Miles-...
Humans aren't obsolete yet, but we're well on our way.
Huh, so costs are properly internalized. Again, well done Canada.
Each and every car made can theoretically land an automaker in court under existing liability laws even when they aren't autonomous, and yet automakers can still afford to make autos.
> To force the driver of its luxury Model S electric sedan to initiate any autonomous overtaking maneuvers by tapping the turn signal. That way, in the event of an accident, it was the person — not the car — which ultimately deemed the overtaking maneuver safe.
That's not going to do much to immunize the manufacturer from liability if the system executing the maneuver is defective in a way which causes a collision in a condition in which it should have been safe to overtake, or even if the defect is simply that it fails to detect that the situation is unsafe when it is signaled to be safe, when it has sufficient sensor coverage from which it reasonably should have been able to determine that the situation was not safe.
The article here seems to be largely based on a fantasy (or perhaps a Tesla press release) that is detached from the principles of liability that have been applied to product manufacturers in general, and auto manufacturers in particular.
That is one mess of an opener.
Absolute nonsense -- put a black box into each vehicle. They already collect mountains of telemetry, and having that will pretty much ensure indemnification.
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/03/20/174...
TL;DR Its tied to the air bag, and records critical metrics to flash when an accident occurs.
Problem not solved. Sorry.