Saturday, April 26, 2014

When your driverless car runs into your neighbor's driverless car

We seem to have this scenario covered. The Department of Defense is currently flight testing flying cars.  I am sure we can also handle the flying car/driverless car mishap.  From Who Is At Fault When a Driverless Car Gets Into an Accident? - -

"Today’s products liability law is the result of decades—or more, if you take the longer view—of precedent that has established the responsibilities that accompany making and selling products. Plaintiffs in products-liability lawsuits can choose from among various (not mutually exclusive) “theories” of liability when seeking to recover damages.
 
Negligence occurs when manufacturers fail to design their products to be safe when used in reasonably foreseeable ways. Consider an autonomous steering technology that works well during the day but that tends to cause fender-benders when used at night. A person whose car is damaged as a result could assert that night driving is a reasonably foreseeable use of a vehicle, and that the manufacturer’s failure to ensure the technology worked effectively at night constitutes negligence.
 
Design defects are another commonly asserted theory of liability. Suppose that the software for controlling braking in an autonomous vehicle doesn’t sufficiently increase braking power when the vehicle needs to stop on a downhill slope. If, as a result, a vehicle causes a frontal collision (i.e., impacts a car in front of it), a person who suffers injuries or economic losses due to the collision could file a design-defects claim against the manufacturer.
 
Even when a design is sound, manufacturers can be liable for manufacturing defects. If an autonomous vehicle technology provider accidentally ships some vehicles with an early, non-market-ready version of software containing a flaw not present in the newer version that was supposed to have been shipped, a person injured in an accident attributable to this flaw could seek to recover damages from the technology provider.
 
Because the process of marketing and selling a product creates explicit and implicit warranties, products liability also involves contract law. Consider a provider of automated parallel parking solutions that claims in advertisements that the system can “parallel park in tight spaces equally well whether it’s day or night.” If, instead, the system only works during the day, and only in spaces that aren’t particularly tight, a purchaser of such a system could file a products liability claim citing breach of warranty (and would likely also allege that there was a design defect).
 
As these examples illustrate, while the specific fact patterns will vary, in products liability terms, manufacturers of autonomous vehicle technologies aren’t really so different from manufacturers in other areas. They have the same basic obligations to offer products that are safe and that work as described during the marketing and sales process, and they have the same set of legal exposures if they fail to do so. Products liability law has been highly adaptive to the many new technologies that have emerged in recent decades, and it will be quite capable of adapting to emerging autonomous vehicle technologies as the need arises."

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