Transcript
On March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg was pushing a bicycle across a four-lane road in Tempe, Arizona, United States, when she was struck by an Uber test vehicle, which was operating in self-drive mode with a human safety backup driver sitting in the driving seat. Herzberg was taken to the local hospital where she died of her injuries, making her the first recorded case of a pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. This quickly made global news and triggered discussions around the safety of self-driving cars, accountability, and so on.
On the other hand, according to WHO, approximately 1.35 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes.
So what is this juxtaposition and why is it viral news just because it’s an autonomous car?
The first factor at play here is the nature of the media chasing headlines. Although these autonomous cars have been driving around for thousands of hours and miles, there is little report on their non-accident. Yet one accident is enough to make breaking news and cause suspicions around self-driving cars globally. There is still some media frenzy around autonomous-driven vehicles, partly because it’s still a sexy topic right now and partly because people are not sure what it is and what’s going to happen.
Second and more important, is the idea of cultural lag. In Arizona, there were selected roads and areas for testing and operation of self-driving vehicles. And if you go to Silicon Valley, you will see Google Waymo vans everywhere. Outside of the United States, one place that’s at the forefront of this is Japan, which has instituted at the national level, a series of legislation to allow autonomous driven vehicles and even trucks in the next few years. They’re quickly trying to build up the technological infrastructure as well as the physical infrastructure to allow this kind of vehicle to operate more effectively and efficiently.
Once you have national and local leaders behind it, the regulatory events will change rapidly around that. And once that happens and insurance changes, ideas of liability would change and the kind of processes required will start developing.
Now think for a moment. With the changing technology and how culture, laws and other regulations have to change and catch up to it, who would be responsible if there was an accident? If you’re crossing the street and an autonomous car cuts you off and ends up knocking you down causing some injury. Who would or should be responsible for that?
Let’s think this way. Today, if very unfortunately, you are hit by a car driven by a human. Who would be responsible? Typically, you will go through a series of legal analyses. Insurance people will be involved. Police officers will show up and do a police report and they would probably attribute some negligence to the driver or to you if you were jaywalking.
While similar procedures could be introduced to the case of autonomous driving vehicles, it does make it difficult. There is one big missing component – the driver. Currently, under tort law, almost everywhere in the world, if a car strikes someone then the driver is almost universally going to be responsible.
If we consider the proxy for that moving forward for autonomous vehicles, it would be the person who owns the vehicle. Yet as technology advances, the idea of owning a vehicle would also be vastly different from before. It may be owned collectively by a neighbourhood or become a utility like electricity – owned by a company. So depending on how these assets are owned, the idea of ownership will also become interesting and how you hold those people accountable.
This is exactly why we hold a little bit of concern in this regard because typically, the bigger the actor is, the more challenging it is for an individual, someone who’s injured, to seek, redress and to recover any type of damages from that.
If you were hit by a driver, you may not find it challenging to sue the driver for compensation. Yet if the car that hits you was owned by Uber, then you may find it difficult to enter a lawsuit against Uber.
