Outsider’s Perspective: On fully autonomous cars and lawsuits

lexus-autonomous-vehicle-front-view (Copy)
I’m certainly not the first one to say that completely autonomous cars, while certainly amazing in their own right and brilliant in their engineering, are most definitely not going to start their takeover of the world quite yet. And there’s a force that will slow them massively. Lawyers.

This has somewhat to do with the scenario presented a couple of months ago by everyone’s favorite cranky middle-aged presenter about autonomous vehicles having to make ethical decisions and perhaps deciding they’ll off you. But that shouldn’t be much of a problem if the programming and encryption of their code is on the same level as it is on cars available on the market today. They’ll very happily swerve and run into some innocent women, children and their pets in an effort to save themselves. No, the problem is when the families of the run-over women and children decide they’ve had just about enough distress and they’ll sue. Who will they sue? Obviously not the people inside it, you can’t call them “drivers” can you? The manufacturers and the dealerships will have to spend tremendous amounts of money to cover their collective rear end. In the end the masses of outraged people will go ahead and decide that *something* must be done.
stanford-university-autonomous-vehicle-driving-stunt (Copy)
From here on it goes one of two ways, either a) It ends up in a stalemate or b) the NHTSA picks up on it and decides to try and do something about it. And by something I mean the logical solution of forcing manufacturers to once again fit controls for the drivers in case of an accident. Even if they don’t actually take control in the event of the crash at least there’s someone to blame.
google-self-driving-car-highway-640x353 (Copy)
Alright I may have taken a few liberties on my specific scenario. For one it’s hardly likely or even possible that the current level of programming and security is still the norm when autonomous vehicles become widespread. For the moment it’s required that there be at least a driver and a passenger in the vehicle while it’s undergoing testing and laws against distracted driving still apply. And that’s ignoring my big assumption that nobody will see this coming and just make autonomous cars normal cars that have the option to drive themselves instead of some absurd vision of a greenhouse on wheels with some furniture.
atnmbl09 (Copy)
In fact why am *I* worrying about? Autonomous cars simply wouldn’t work here. You’d have to pretty much keep the auto mode disabled unless you never want to get anywhere because your autonomobile keeps letting people cut in line because it isn’t programmed to take the offense or you want to crash into a field because there wasn’t any signs telling the car that the street goes left and the GPS system hasn’t quite figured out where the road actually goes. According to Wiki A 2013 survey of 1,500 consumers across 10 countries by Cisco Systems found a full 57% “stated they would be likely to ride in a car controlled entirely by technology that does not require a human driver”, with Brazil, India and China the most willing to trust autonomous technology. What do all of those countries have in common? Their streets are absolute chaos. Meanwhile, the same studies say that in Japan, where things are much more orderly and people commit seppuku if they fail to keep lane discipline [citation needed], the percentage is much lower. Why would we need it? Everyone seems to be doing pretty well at this “driving” thing. And of course the top countries are places where the roads are very poorly lit/poorly marked/plain poor. Not precisely the place where autonomous cars would thrive.
Of course there’s also a fault on this theory. Russia isn’t on top three on this study, it only managed fifth place. And if any country on earth needs autonomous cars so their owners can go back to the important things (read: their vodka), it’s them.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 64 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop files here

  1. Dabidoh_Sambone Avatar
    Dabidoh_Sambone

    Lawyers ruin all that is good. My estate atty has kept himself ‘busy’ for five years without much to show for it. Patent atty’s and patent troll atty’s are destined for the lowest rung in hell, but I’m sure the copyright lawyers might discover an even deeper ring of hell when they’re all rounded up and put against the wall. As for self driving cars, they’ll yield to every offensively driven auto on the road? That’s a depressing thought. You’d have to pretend to drive your self-driving car to avoid being cut off by those seeking a 2 sec. advantage. Where’s the shiny future I was promised?

  2. CapitalistRoader Avatar
    CapitalistRoader

    Why would we need it? Everyone seems to be doing pretty well at this “driving” thing.

    34,000 motor vehicle deaths per year in the U.S.? 200,000 injured?
    There will be a tipping point. When autonomous cars reach N percent of trips year coupled with N percent fewer accidents than human-driven cars, the insurance companies will scream for tort reform legislation absolving auto manufacturers of any blame for accidents that aren’t strictly the fault of the car. For example, can a person can hide in front a car parked on the side of the road, dart in front of an autonomous car, and sue because the car didn’t stop within five feet going 30mph? Of course not. It would be ludicrous to blame the manufacture for those injuries.
    At some point non-commercial , human-driven cars in urban areas will be banned except for Sundays between 8am and 5pm, so drivers can congregate at the local Sonic drive-in. Autonomous cars will be, I’m guessing, ten times safer than self-driven cars in the city. The political pressure to ban self driving cars will be intense, led by the insurance companies and supported by a majority of voters. Chapters of Mothers Against Self Driving will sprout up in every metro area.
    I’m guessing we’re less than 20 years away from this new world.

  3. Lokki Avatar
    Lokki

    I think you looking far too far into the future. It will take 40 or 50 years for autonomous vehicles to reach any statistically noticable portion of the privately owned vehicles on the road and given Moore’s law et al that is plenty of time to develop very sophisticated sensors and programming. The first use of autonomous vehicles, and this will take 20 years IMHO, to become common will be long-haul cargo transport trucks. These trucks generally do “very easy” driving – all on our well-engineered and relatively uncrowned interstate highways. Further, they already run from ‘terminal to terminal’ avoiding major cities and their traffic.
    Why these first? ‘Semi’ trucks are expensive anyhow, and the addition of 40 or 50 thousand dollars to the price won’t be a deal breaker, especially noting that an over-the-road driver costs a company roughly 120 thousand dollars a year (including per dime and benefit costs). It won’t take very many years to recoup the cost of the equipment.
    The next front will be pizza delivery drivers and ice cream vendors etc. You will summon the vehicle on your phone and pay with your phone and the truck will find you via your phone. You WILL have to walk to the curb to pick up (at least until small robots get a bit better). Eventually you will see pizza trucks that bake your pizza enroute by using the currently developing fast-food robot technology.
    Only after these kinds of uses have paid the developments costs will you see any autonomous taxi or private transportation vehicles, beyond a Tesla or two. Further market penetration will require that costs don’t substantially exceed ‘ordinary’ vehicle costs (see the Prius). That will be a long, long time coming.

    1. CapitalistRoader Avatar
      CapitalistRoader

      Further market penetration will require that costs don’t substantially exceed ‘ordinary’ vehicle costs (see the Prius). That will be a long, long time coming.

      Perhaps. Alternatively all but the very rich will stop buying/leasing cars and subscribe to a car service—similar to cell phone plans today—because it will be so much less expensive to do so. Car utilization will double, triple, quintuple, who knows? An autonomous car operated by a car service might cost twice as much as a drivered car but if its duty cycle is five times greater then it’s still a bargain.
      The technology is very close IMHO but it’s expensive and of course there’s the tort issue. As you wrote, Moore’s Law should quickly bring down the cost, if the demand is present. Senior citizens, kids, the disabled, drunk people would all greatly benefit from an inexpensive, door-to-door car service. I can’t help but think the urban ground transportation landscape will be unrecognizable by today’s car owners ten years from now.
      The Anitplanner frequently has columns about how the emergence of autonomous cars might play out.