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What about manufacturer liability? That's the critical question here. It can't just be 2X or even 10X safer than humans if the manufacturer is liable for the a

by abalone 11y ago

What about manufacturer liability? That's the critical question here. It can't just be 2X or even 10X safer than humans if the manufacturer is liable for the accident. That would EXPLODE the cost of these cars and bankrupt companies -- even if just a small fraction of today's fatal accidents due to driver error became Google's liability. Consider that even single-vehicle accidents, which today might be the driver's fault, could result in a manufacturer lawsuit. This is why I think fully autonomous without any human to intervene is a pipe dream, because the safety level required for that is pretty close to perfectly bugfree in an almost infinitely complex world of roads and conditions. Just for liability reasons. These test cars of course have human copilots. But it remains to be seen if that really will grant manufacturers immunity for accidents. If the car is perfect 99.999% of the time, wouldn't that train the human to trust it and not pay as close attention? And then miss that 0.001% of the time when it hurts someone? Would a judge find it reasonable for a human to stay vigilant and responsible for that fatal corner case bug that cropped up after two years of perfect autonomous driving? Liability is The. Critical. Question.

Animats 11y ago
Volvo's CEO: "We are the suppliers of this technology and we are liable for everything the car is doing in autonomous mode. If you are not ready to make such a statement, you shouldn't try to develop an autonomous system." So there. At first, self-driving cars will probably be leased on operating leases, with maintenance and insurance bundled into the payments. Or maybe you own the vehicle, but there's a maintenance and insurance contract required to enable self-driving.
danieltillett 11y ago
In theory this just shifts the insurance coverage from the driver to the manufacturer. The real unknown is if any insurance company will cover the manufacturer or not. I suspect that like the airline industry there will need to be a legislated cap on damages to make this work. Provided that there is insurance then there should not be any issue. More fundamentally we should not assume that the people working on this at Google are idiots. They already know all of this and I am sure they are working with insurance companies and governments to solve this problem. Compared to the technical difficulty of making a reliable and safe autonomous vehicle this is an easy problem.
mikeash 11y ago
Are you saying this because manufacturers, being gigantic unsympathetic companies, would be sued for much greater damages than at-fault drivers get hit with today? Otherwise it makes no sense, TCO will come out the same whether drivers or manufacturers are liable.
fweespeech 11y ago
> It can't just be 2X or even 10X safer than humans if the manufacturer is liable for the accident. That would EXPLODE the cost of these cars and bankrupt companies -- even if just a small fraction of today's fatal accidents due to driver error became Google's liability. Right now, the insurance company is liable for the accident followed by the consumer. It'll just shift the insurance market towards manufacturers buying it [or likely self-insuring] and the cost of insuring a car will be baked into the price instead of bought aftermarket.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Right now, the insurance company is liable for the accident followed by the consumer. Actually, the driver is liable, but in most states (in order to be legally permitted to drive on public roads) must either have purchased insurance to cover some minimum amount of that liability or have posted a liability bond. But the insurer's obligation to pay is triggered by the driver's liability, not ahead of the driver's liability.
DenisM 11y ago
There is no explosion. The cost of collisions today is reflected in the car insurance, so about $100/mo. If the manufacturer were to absorb this liability at current incident rates, it would make cars about 30% more expensive (assuming $300/mo loan payments). If Google reduces the (incidence * impact) of collision by 10x, the cost will come down to $10/mo, or about 3% of the total car cost. And in return for the modest price increase you get a self-driving car!
- abalone 11y ago
  You're forgetting about tort damages. Insurance does not typically cover the cost of killing or seriously injuring someone. Those damages go into the millions, far exceeding the maximum coverage. Cases of serious injury and death often end up bankrupting the responsible individual. Also consider that there are more people who can sue per accident, because humans aren't responsible anymore. Today if you're driving the car and get in a accident and it's your fault, you can't sue anyone. Now you can. That's one more party per accident, and a whole category of single-vehicle accidents than now result in lawsuits.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    The solution is to cap the level of damages as already happens in the airline industry.
    - abalone 11y ago
      That's wishful thinking. 1. Airplanes have highly trained trained human pilots who are highly vigilant and often in semi-manual control during takeoff and landing. Not a valid comparison. 2. Typical auto insurance policies have liability limits of around $100K. In cases of serious injury or death, tort damages often exceed that tremendously and bankrupt the responsible person. The solution is to get the legislature to cap tort damages for killing someone at ~$100K? Not going to happen.
      - danieltillett 11y ago
dragonwriter 11y ago
> It can't just be 2X or even 10X safer than humans if the manufacturer is liable for the accident. That would EXPLODE the cost of these cars and bankrupt companies -- even if just a small fraction of today's fatal accidents due to driver error became Google's liability. If the owner/operator bears no liability and all liability is on the manufacturer, it transfers the liability cost onto the manufacturer, but even if it is as safe (not 2× or 10× as safe), that just means the manufacturer rolls the cost to (self-, likely) insure for that liability into the purchase price (but the purchaser doesn't need to get their own insurance, so the total cost of operation to the purchaser is unaffected.) And, of course, if a company like Google is both the manufacturer and the owner/operator (e.g., using the vehicles in an Uber-like service tied in with Google Maps and Google Now, or using them for Google Express delivery vehicles with smaller robots onboard to deliver packages to the door, or using them for Google Street View camera vehicles, etc.), operator vs. manufacturer liability makes no difference.
bertil 11y ago
You are assuming that, if liability in the US was a critical question, Google would not launch its project in a country with most hospitable weather and more compatible liability rules and from there, lobby for more reasonable principles in the US.
ergothus 11y ago
Or we could learn to stop suing people over everything. I mean, gross neglect is one thing, but if it's a safer driver than I am, and it screws up, we call that an accident. ... Nah, I'm dreaming, it's far more likely that insurance companies will set up a wide insurance program ala taxi services than it is that we'll learn to stop being litigious.
- lucb1e 11y ago
  > gross neglect is one thing, but if it's a safer driver than I am, and it screws up, we call that an accident. Exactly my thoughts. You typically have very little to go on if a company did something to you and they were not in neglect. At least in Europe/The Netherlands, I don't really know about the US. (The stories we hear is that in the US, neglect means not warning that coffee is indeed hot, or that you should not put pets in a microwave to warm them up... I don't believe that really so I'll just assume it's similar to here.)
petra 11y ago
If it's only 10X better than humans ,and considering that professional drivers are about 10x better than the average, maybe we're better of with something like shared UBER ? Or maybe just add self driving for the highway , especially if it's possible for the driver to get off the vehicle before entering the highway , and hop on another car entering the city ?
SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
1. Air bags sometimes kill people who would otherwise have survived in an accident, but on balance they save lives. 2. Making air bags mandatory hasn't caused manufacturers of cars or of air bags to go bankrupt. 3. If self-driving cars cause deaths, but on balance save lives, the situation is directly analogous. 4. There will be a way to make self-driving cars work. Q.E.D. I seem to remember that laws exist to grant immunity to manufacturers of airbags, at least if they were functioning properly. A quick Google finds lots of ambulance-chasers who talk about "defective airbags," so manufacturers aren't immune to liability if they screwed up. Similarly, you could imagine that No Fault laws could be passed for self-driving cars that were operating within reasonable parameters. A gross error on the part of a self-driving car could still leave manufacturers liable, but as history has shown, car companies are willing to write off even gross negligence claims rather than voluntarily add safety devices to cars, calculating cost-to-fix vs cost-to-pay-off-family tradeoffs. [1] In fact, I'd go as far as to say that, any company that doesn't offer self-driving cars in the next 15 years may as well plan to shut down or be acquired. This is going to be a must-have feature. They will figure out how to make it work for manufacturers. The liability question will be solved. They wouldn't even let car companies go bankrupt when they (arguably) deserved to; they certainly won't let them get into a situation that kills them, and as others have rightfully pointed out, the numbers aren't even that prohibitive if they needed to self-insure. [1] http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1658545_1658498_1657866,00.html http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1...
- abalone 11y ago
  That is a very poor analogy. Airbags have only killed a few hundred people and in many of those cases the manufacturer was still not liable because of human error (victim was not wearing a seatbelt, was a child improperly seated in the front, etc.) The manufacturer liability exposure for fully autonomous driving is literally several orders of magnitude greater than for airbags.
- MagnumOpus 11y ago
  > quick Google finds lots of ambulance-chasers who talk about "defective airbags," That is the Takata airbag case - they manufactured defective airbag with malfunctioning ammonium nitrate inflators which exploded supersonically instead of inflating, killing 8 people. They were fined $200m just recently and have to recall and replace 400,000 airbags. This case might actually be analogous to self-driving car issues - it was a case of a defect potentially caused through negligence in engineering, rather than airbags working as intended.
avar 11y ago
Liability of all things is "The. Critical. Question." when it comes to autonomous vehicles? That's such an amazingly American thing to say. Do you really think that the uptake of autonomous vehicles is going to be hindered to any significant degree by what are largely U.S.-specific legal issues? Can you imagine a world in 2060 where the U.S. decides to leave something like 10-20% of GDP on the table because of the liability aspects of their legal environment? It might hinder uptake a bit but I don't see it stopping it in the long run. In any case regardless of what the U.S. does at that time the rest of the world is going to be driving autonomous vehicles.
- abalone 11y ago
  In what country are you not liable for hurting someone with a car? I want to know.
  - mavhc 11y ago
    New York, apparently
  - avar 11y ago
    There's liability in a lot of countries, punitive damages aren't a thing in a lot of them So if your autonomous car kill someone you could just say "yes, shit happens, we'll fix it, but look at how the death toll from vehicles has gone down drastically due to this technology, maybe the courts shouldn't sue us out of existence when the alternative is a drunk/distracted/incompetent human behind the wheel?". The OP is suggesting that that's going to happen in the U.S., maybe it will, but that's not the reality in many other countries.
    - openasocket 11y ago
      Punitive damages are extra compensation to discourage future behavior. Yes, these are not used in every country, but compensatory damages certainly are, and those can get pretty high.
      - 11y ago
wsetchell 11y ago
I don't think liability is that key here. cost of damages = # of accidents * cost per accident - Self driving cars should reduce the number of accidents - Cost per accident seems independent of the kind of car you drive. If a human driven taxi hits me, I can sue the taxi company. If a self driven taxi hits me, I can sue Google. I should be able to sue for the same amount in either case.
bradtemp 11y ago
I (the author of the OP) have an article about accidents at http://robocars.com/accident.html http://robocars.com/accident.html looking into many of these issues.

by abalone 11y ago

Animats 11y ago

Volvo's CEO: "We are the suppliers of this technology and we are liable for everything the car is doing in autonomous mode. If you are not ready to make such a statement, you shouldn't try to develop an autonomous system." So there. At first, self-driving cars will probably be leased on operating leases, with maintenance and insurance bundled into the payments. Or maybe you own the vehicle, but there's a maintenance and insurance contract required to enable self-driving.

danieltillett 11y ago

In theory this just shifts the insurance coverage from the driver to the manufacturer. The real unknown is if any insurance company will cover the manufacturer or not. I suspect that like the airline industry there will need to be a legislated cap on damages to make this work. Provided that there is insurance then there should not be any issue. More fundamentally we should not assume that the people working on this at Google are idiots. They already know all of this and I am sure they are working with insurance companies and governments to solve this problem. Compared to the technical difficulty of making a reliable and safe autonomous vehicle this is an easy problem.

mikeash 11y ago

Are you saying this because manufacturers, being gigantic unsympathetic companies, would be sued for much greater damages than at-fault drivers get hit with today? Otherwise it makes no sense, TCO will come out the same whether drivers or manufacturers are liable.

fweespeech 11y ago

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Right now, the insurance company is liable for the accident followed by the consumer. Actually, the driver is liable, but in most states (in order to be legally permitted to drive on public roads) must either have purchased insurance to cover some minimum amount of that liability or have posted a liability bond. But the insurer's obligation to pay is triggered by the driver's liability, not ahead of the driver's liability.

DenisM 11y ago

There is no explosion. The cost of collisions today is reflected in the car insurance, so about $100/mo. If the manufacturer were to absorb this liability at current incident rates, it would make cars about 30% more expensive (assuming $300/mo loan payments). If Google reduces the (incidence * impact) of collision by 10x, the cost will come down to $10/mo, or about 3% of the total car cost. And in return for the modest price increase you get a self-driving car!

abalone 11y ago
You're forgetting about tort damages. Insurance does not typically cover the cost of killing or seriously injuring someone. Those damages go into the millions, far exceeding the maximum coverage. Cases of serious injury and death often end up bankrupting the responsible individual. Also consider that there are more people who can sue per accident, because humans aren't responsible anymore. Today if you're driving the car and get in a accident and it's your fault, you can't sue anyone. Now you can. That's one more party per accident, and a whole category of single-vehicle accidents than now result in lawsuits.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  The solution is to cap the level of damages as already happens in the airline industry.
  - abalone 11y ago
    That's wishful thinking. 1. Airplanes have highly trained trained human pilots who are highly vigilant and often in semi-manual control during takeoff and landing. Not a valid comparison. 2. Typical auto insurance policies have liability limits of around $100K. In cases of serious injury or death, tort damages often exceed that tremendously and bankrupt the responsible person. The solution is to get the legislature to cap tort damages for killing someone at ~$100K? Not going to happen.
    - danieltillett 11y ago

dragonwriter 11y ago

> It can't just be 2X or even 10X safer than humans if the manufacturer is liable for the accident. That would EXPLODE the cost of these cars and bankrupt companies -- even if just a small fraction of today's fatal accidents due to driver error became Google's liability. If the owner/operator bears no liability and all liability is on the manufacturer, it transfers the liability cost onto the manufacturer, but even if it is as safe (not 2× or 10× as safe), that just means the manufacturer rolls the cost to (self-, likely) insure for that liability into the purchase price (but the purchaser doesn't need to get their own insurance, so the total cost of operation to the purchaser is unaffected.) And, of course, if a company like Google is both the manufacturer and the owner/operator (e.g., using the vehicles in an Uber-like service tied in with Google Maps and Google Now, or using them for Google Express delivery vehicles with smaller robots onboard to deliver packages to the door, or using them for Google Street View camera vehicles, etc.), operator vs. manufacturer liability makes no difference.

bertil 11y ago

You are assuming that, if liability in the US was a critical question, Google would not launch its project in a country with most hospitable weather and more compatible liability rules and from there, lobby for more reasonable principles in the US.

ergothus 11y ago

Or we could learn to stop suing people over everything. I mean, gross neglect is one thing, but if it's a safer driver than I am, and it screws up, we call that an accident. ... Nah, I'm dreaming, it's far more likely that insurance companies will set up a wide insurance program ala taxi services than it is that we'll learn to stop being litigious.

lucb1e 11y ago
> gross neglect is one thing, but if it's a safer driver than I am, and it screws up, we call that an accident. Exactly my thoughts. You typically have very little to go on if a company did something to you and they were not in neglect. At least in Europe/The Netherlands, I don't really know about the US. (The stories we hear is that in the US, neglect means not warning that coffee is indeed hot, or that you should not put pets in a microwave to warm them up... I don't believe that really so I'll just assume it's similar to here.)

petra 11y ago

If it's only 10X better than humans ,and considering that professional drivers are about 10x better than the average, maybe we're better of with something like shared UBER ? Or maybe just add self driving for the highway , especially if it's possible for the driver to get off the vehicle before entering the highway , and hop on another car entering the city ?

SomeCallMeTim 11y ago

1. Air bags sometimes kill people who would otherwise have survived in an accident, but on balance they save lives. 2. Making air bags mandatory hasn't caused manufacturers of cars or of air bags to go bankrupt. 3. If self-driving cars cause deaths, but on balance save lives, the situation is directly analogous. 4. There will be a way to make self-driving cars work. Q.E.D. I seem to remember that laws exist to grant immunity to manufacturers of airbags, at least if they were functioning properly. A quick Google finds lots of ambulance-chasers who talk about "defective airbags," so manufacturers aren't immune to liability if they screwed up. Similarly, you could imagine that No Fault laws could be passed for self-driving cars that were operating within reasonable parameters. A gross error on the part of a self-driving car could still leave manufacturers liable, but as history has shown, car companies are willing to write off even gross negligence claims rather than voluntarily add safety devices to cars, calculating cost-to-fix vs cost-to-pay-off-family tradeoffs. [1] In fact, I'd go as far as to say that, any company that doesn't offer self-driving cars in the next 15 years may as well plan to shut down or be acquired. This is going to be a must-have feature. They will figure out how to make it work for manufacturers. The liability question will be solved. They wouldn't even let car companies go bankrupt when they (arguably) deserved to; they certainly won't let them get into a situation that kills them, and as others have rightfully pointed out, the numbers aren't even that prohibitive if they needed to self-insure. [1] http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1658545_1658498_1657866,00.html http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1...

abalone 11y ago
That is a very poor analogy. Airbags have only killed a few hundred people and in many of those cases the manufacturer was still not liable because of human error (victim was not wearing a seatbelt, was a child improperly seated in the front, etc.) The manufacturer liability exposure for fully autonomous driving is literally several orders of magnitude greater than for airbags.
MagnumOpus 11y ago
> quick Google finds lots of ambulance-chasers who talk about "defective airbags," That is the Takata airbag case - they manufactured defective airbag with malfunctioning ammonium nitrate inflators which exploded supersonically instead of inflating, killing 8 people. They were fined $200m just recently and have to recall and replace 400,000 airbags. This case might actually be analogous to self-driving car issues - it was a case of a defect potentially caused through negligence in engineering, rather than airbags working as intended.

avar 11y ago

Liability of all things is "The. Critical. Question." when it comes to autonomous vehicles? That's such an amazingly American thing to say. Do you really think that the uptake of autonomous vehicles is going to be hindered to any significant degree by what are largely U.S.-specific legal issues? Can you imagine a world in 2060 where the U.S. decides to leave something like 10-20% of GDP on the table because of the liability aspects of their legal environment? It might hinder uptake a bit but I don't see it stopping it in the long run. In any case regardless of what the U.S. does at that time the rest of the world is going to be driving autonomous vehicles.

abalone 11y ago
In what country are you not liable for hurting someone with a car? I want to know.
- mavhc 11y ago
  New York, apparently
- avar 11y ago
  There's liability in a lot of countries, punitive damages aren't a thing in a lot of them So if your autonomous car kill someone you could just say "yes, shit happens, we'll fix it, but look at how the death toll from vehicles has gone down drastically due to this technology, maybe the courts shouldn't sue us out of existence when the alternative is a drunk/distracted/incompetent human behind the wheel?". The OP is suggesting that that's going to happen in the U.S., maybe it will, but that's not the reality in many other countries.
  - openasocket 11y ago
    Punitive damages are extra compensation to discourage future behavior. Yes, these are not used in every country, but compensatory damages certainly are, and those can get pretty high.
    - 11y ago

wsetchell 11y ago

I don't think liability is that key here. cost of damages = # of accidents * cost per accident - Self driving cars should reduce the number of accidents - Cost per accident seems independent of the kind of car you drive. If a human driven taxi hits me, I can sue the taxi company. If a self driven taxi hits me, I can sue Google. I should be able to sue for the same amount in either case.

bradtemp 11y ago

I (the author of the OP) have an article about accidents at http://robocars.com/accident.html http://robocars.com/accident.html looking into many of these issues.