Tuesday, December 22, 2015

"If Two Cars Crash and No One Is Driving Them, Does It Make a Sound? Yes: Ka-Ching!"

Bloomberg: Imagine a robot car with no one behind the wheel hitting another driverless car. Who’s at fault?
The answer: No one knows. But plaintiff’s lawyers are salivating at the prospects for big paydays from such accidents. If computers routinely crash, they say, then so will cars operated by them. And with no one behind the wheel, lawyers say they can go after almost anyone even remotely involved.
“You’re going to get a whole host of new defendants,” said Kevin Dean, who is suing General Motors Co. over its faulty ignition switches and Takata Corp. over air-bag failures. “Computer programmers, computer companies, designers of algorithms, Google, mapping companies, even states. It’s going to be very fertile ground for lawyers.”

4 comments:

ampersand said...

Program the vehicles to run over lawyers.

OT How come no news on the Las Vegas killer driver?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Is very simple. Google is betting that there will be less accidents.

For example... Study says not using turn signals causes more accidents than distracted driving... the driverless car will not forget to turn on the signal.

Leland said...

I bet Kevin Dean is a progressive.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

This is a bit hyperbolic

Yes there will be a bunch of legal issues worked out in early cases. But what drives huge lawsuits is horrible injuries. If these driverless cars kill and maim people, yes there will be big lawsuits. If it is just driverless cars hitting each other, the damages become almost nominal to the cost of litigation.

Of course the Trooper York response would be lawyers suck and he hires someone to drive him around, so sue him if something goes wrong.