Author: Abhimanyu Ghoshal / Source: The Next Web
Uber‘s been let off the hook by prosecutors in a case involving one of the company’s autonomous test cars that fatally struck a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona last year, reports Reuters. However, the back-up driver behind the wheel will likely be referred to local police for further investigation, and that could potentially see him face charges of vehicular manslaughter for the accidental killing of Elaine Herzberg.
The news should serve to advance our thinking on one of the biggest questions we’ve had for years about self-driving vehicles: who is at fault when a self-driving car gets in an accident? We might be a bit closer to the answer than a few years ago, but we don’t yet have the entire rulebook to decide who to blame in such instances.
The notion of liability in such incidents has been discussed in articles dating back to 2013. The following year, John Villasenor wrote in The Atlantic that “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.”
Describing how we deal with accidents involving traditional cars, Villasenor pointed to vehicular issues that could be traced back to automakers’ negligence or manufacturing defects – in which case the company that produced the car could be held responsible.
Now, consider The Economist’s breakdown of what went wrong in the Elaine Herzberg case, based on the report from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
You can read the entire explanation here; it boils down to a system design failure, in which the car’s perception module got confused and didn’t correctly classify the object in front of it as a pedestrian. Next, the automated braking system didn’t prevent the collision, and instead required the human operator behind…
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