Is Google’s Self Driving Autonomous Cars the indication of world without Crashworthiness Lawsuits and Laws in future?

Google’s self-driving autonomous cars have already driven more than 160,000 miles (As of 06.07.2012) and, it can be the future of current vehicles that we drive everyday to work, pleasure and to commute from one place to the other.

Many questions arise when we think of the car that we are driving every day, could potentially be replaced by Google’s self-driving autonomous cars. One of the questions could be, what would happen to the crashworthiness lawsuits and the automotive product liability cases? These cases come into play when the vehicle is in an accident, and, the defect in the vehicle causes the driver or the passenger with the serious injury.

So many people die every year in car wrecks because of the ineffective safety systems inbuilt in the vehicle by the manufacturers. But, with the automation that is going on with the Google cars, and, the concept of machine learning (Artificial Intelligence), it may not be impossible that we might be able to bring the car accidents to NULL. This would bring the vehicle failure cases to null as well because every vehicle crashworthiness case is a car accident case but, not every car accident case is a vehicle crashworthiness case.

[accordions disabled=”false” autoheight=”false” collapsible=”true”]
[accordion title=”Transcript”]

If we are successful in bringing car accidents to NULL, we will have no problem, but, what if minor percentage of accidents still occur in these automated systems? Who should be liable for the defects in Google’s self-driving autonomous cars?

Stanford Center for Internet and Society has its own answer for the Google’s self-driving autonomous vehicle’s product liability cases in future. Ryan Calo, who is the director for Privacy and Robotics said, “At the end of the day it’s the person in the car or the person that made the car”. This means, according to Ryan, nothing drastic is going to change on the responsible parties for vehicle safety defects causing accidents and personal injuries. If anything goes wrong in an automated car, under automated control, then the faulty party would be either hardware defect, driver defect or the defect in the driving system. This again brings car manufacturers like Hyundai, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Ford, BMW etc. subject to liability and claims for any car defects in the car causing injuries to driver or the passengers in the car during accident.

[/accordion]
[/accordions]