Electrek Survey: Readers Say Vehicle Owners, Not Passengers, Should Be Liable in Self-Driving Crashes

For the last few weeks, we’ve been running a sidebar survey about whether our Electrek readers who should be held responsible when AI fails, and people get hurt. After nearly 3,000 responses, here’s what you told us.

In case you missed the survey, the question read, “A number of fatal Tesla accidents are making headlines while Waymo racks up thousands of parking tickets, and the sheer volume of autonomous taxis means those numbers will keep climbing – but when an AI-driven taxi fails, who should be responsible?”

The survey coincided with both the re-unveiling of the Tesla Cybercab earlier this month in Austin, Texas, and news that the long-delayed Tesla Semi had begun series production in Nevada. As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that there were a lot of responses. What was surprising (to me, at least), was just how many people were ready to absolve the person behind the steering wheel of any wrongdoing when things went sideways.

By the numbers

Just 102 votes (about 3.5%) were cast for the personal responsibility option that read, “Whoever is sitting in the driver’s seat: even if YOU summoned the taxi, it’s common sense that human intervention will sometimes be required, and YOU are the human.” And, for what it’s worth, at least two of those votes were from me (sue me).

This one seemed genuinely obvious to me, but that’s what interacting with the other humans is all about: listening, learning, and growing. And what I heard, learned, and grew to finally believe, myself, is that it was the owner of the vehicle who should shoulder the burden of liability – that belief was fueled by commenters like Ian …

This is obvious. Whether the driver is AI or the human, the liable person is the owner of the car. If I lend my car to you and you drive it into a coffee shop, I get to pay for the damages. The car is insured, not the driver. I don’t know why people are asking this question. It is well settled in existing law.

IAN

… and pushedbyvolts, who (I thought) said it best …

Whoever owns the vehicle should get the blame. Every car ever built is capable of breaking the law and the driver gets the blame when it happens. If there’s no driver, the registered owner is the responsible party for putting a lawbreaking vehicle on the street. If that screws up someone’s driverless taxi business model, so be it.

PUSHEDBYVOLTS

… by pointing out the fact that, yes, every car ever built actually is capable of breaking the law – whether that’s by speeding, parking illegally, or being intentionally used as a weapon against another person. And, in every one of those cases, it seems insane to even consider holding a manufacturer or a technology supplier liable.

That said, nearly 90% of the votes put the blame squarely on the developers of the AI driving the car. Stephen Fields’ comment made, I think, the most compelling case for this:

What action could the owner have taken to prevent an accident? They buy a black box which drives the vehicle. If the owner failed to follow the recommendations of the manufacturer (ie keep software up to date, stay in this geofence) they could be liable but they could not be held liable if there is no action they could have taken to prevent an accident.

STEPHEN FIELDS

That argument also makes a ton of sense, though I would argue that summoning a vehicle that offered you no means of saving yourself when other options were readily available is, in itself, an assumption of liability – but when other options aren’t available? That’s a different story, and there’s a bunch of nuance to parse through that lays blame at the feet of both the manufacturer and the AI developer, to varying degrees.

No matter who eventually gets the blame, however, regular commenter BCGeiger delivered what I considered to be the coup de grâce in this case:

I think liability should be split evenly between the car manufacturer and the AI manufacturer. It isn’t (an) either or thing. They are working hand-in-hand to bring about this hellscape.

BCGEIGER

“Hellscape” is what sold it for me, but then I just turned around and asked a different AI to make the featured image (at top) and to help me pretty up the graph, above, so what do I know? Let us know if you agree with the nearly 9/10 Electrekkers who responded to the original survey, or if we all got it wrong, in the comments.

Original content from Electrek.

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