just the legal question; if I drive with a family and autocar will smash into me, killing my children and wounding me so I cannot walk or work, who is going to be liable? car manufacturer, producer of the tires, software engineers house, or GPS system? Could see 20 years of litigation between all parties involved before I get a dime for recovery, or probably die first.
I've yet to read Nevada's regulations, but having it be the same as for regular cars would make the most sense. In an isolated accident, the operator's insurance company is liable. If there's a fundamental flaw with the cars, the manufacturer issues a recall. It's far more likely that an inattentive human driver will smash into a driverless car than the reverse, though.
I guess what I was trying to say is that cars were designed to be driven by humans, and although there are situations where machine's fault is hard to prove [1], in reality adding additional layer of decision-making piece of hardware will make it even harder to determine who's fault was when my children, hypothetically, died in a car accident smashed by a second car.
Almost all auto fatalities are caused by human error. I think saving 1 million+ lives per year is worth the legal wrangling to determine fault for the remaining few accidents.
There are already rules applied by insurance companies for deciding liability in an accident. Just apply those same rules as if your over-the-top rhetorically invoked children were killed by a human driver. Retributive criminal penalties for accidents should be done away with in favor of civil action handled by insurance companies, except in cases of gross negligence or willful harm (e.g. the owner of the car instructed the computer to cause an accident).
one possibility is today's system - whoever owns the car (whether it's a private individual, a cab company, or the city) will pay for insurance, and that insurance will pay out to cover any damages.
Now, what happens if there's a bug in the software, causing a lot of damage at once? Can the insurance sue the programmers to recover losses? Probably; but at the least, the victims should be paid promptly by the insurance contract, without the need to wait for a court settlement.
Yeah, but if insurers have to assume that liability until they can maybe recover damages (just think, the car manufacturer or software firm might not even exist anymore and the car still on the road), insurance is going to be very expensive for these things. Insurance companies aren't a charity, they're going to have to pass on those losses into the premiums.
I think the only way it works is if the state certifies the vehicle and requires a liability policy that will pay for any incident.
If the systems are good, I think such policies will be cheaper than liability insurance for a bad driver. If the systems are bad, I wonder such a policy will be available at all.
The manufacturer would still be on the hook for defects found after the certification, and I expect defective vehicles with no remaining manufacturer will simply not be licensed for operation.
I think one of the main issues with liability here isn't the expected loss - I would be extremely surprised if driverless cars weren't much safer than ones with drivers, at least once the major kinks are worked out - it's the correlation between accidents. Currently, accidents happen more or less at random; when controlled by software, a bunch of cars might go berserk at once, bankrupting an insurance company in a fit of bad zeroes and ones.
Automated hospital equipment might be a place to look for precedent in regulations, not sure what they are but it is a similar situation in that a machine malfunctioning could cause injury or death.
