Autonomous vehicles will not survive First Contact
with the American Tort Bar.
You heard it here first.
I see your point, but you are not looking at the big picture. The big picture is quite simple when you're thinking of these 'driverless' vehicles. It is simply a matter of control and who has it. You can bet your bottom dollar that before it's all over it is the government that will have every bit of that control. Do you honestly think they'd let anyone stop a power grab like that?
They’ll introduce a law to give robot manufacturers immunity.
Robots will soon be driving better than nearly all humans but nothing is 100% perfect. It doesn’t make sense to run manufacturers into the ground if they are overall far safer than human drivers
“Autonomous vehicles will not survive First Contact with the American Tort Bar.”
No, they will not.
Personal injury lawyers are going to have a field day with self-driving cars, as well they should, given the extreme likelihood of continuous death and mayhem from this foolish, not-yet-ready-for-prime-time technology.
and the great thing about this from a liability lawyer’s standpoint is that almost all accidents nowadays are caused by the drivers and NOT by faulty or unsafe auto design or manufacturing. Thus, today’s main liability targets have been the bad drivers themselves and their insurance companies, IF THEY ARE INSURED.
With driverless cars, there’s no possibility that the drivers can be at fault since there aren’t any, and therefore there’s a 100% chance that the manufacturers are at fault, and the manufacturers have DEEP pockets, unlike individual drivers, even the ones WITH insurance.
Quite quickly, driverless car makers will be sued out of existence unless states absolve them of their liability, at which point it becomes open season on the innocents by driverless car manufactures. (In point of fact, the liability waiver would actually have to occur at the Federal level because of cars sold in a state that has liability waivers driving across the border to another state that has no liability waivers.)
Ubiquitous driverless cars are part of the same nonsensical utopia as ubiquitous flying cars, ubiquitous electric cars, ubiquitous wind power and ubiquitous solar power.
What will happen is the auto-car industry will shovel a sufficient amount of money into the pockets of Congressmen and friends and families thereof, and immunities will be made law.
See: telco immunity