Comment by callc
1 day ago
I am, in general, hoping AV will reduce road deaths in the future.
The last hurdle is regulatory. We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society.
The question is how to achieve fairness. If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?
> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.
Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...
The standard for human drivers is through the floor.
The reason that’s a news story is because the outcome is unusual.
When things are normal and happening all the time, they’re not reported as abnormal outcomes.
The world is a big place. Being able to think of a counter-example does not negate a general point.
No, it's actually fairly common in crashes between motor vehicles and pedestrians (or cyclists) to place most or all of the blame on the pedestrian.
When the Uber self-driving car struck and killed the pedestrian, not only did the internet peanut gallery largely blame the pedestrian for the first 24 hours or so after the death, but the local police force did as well for a couple of days. I rather suspect that without the national spotlight of being the first pedestrian killed by a self-driving car, the local police force would have been happy to absolve Uber and the driver of any liability.
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Is it? Laura Bush ran a stop sign and killed her friend. No charges. Caitlyn Jenner hit a car and pushed it into on coming traffic killed someone. No charges. I can keep going and going.
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No, the reason that's a news story is because many people were upset about the accident, which killed an entire family of 4 while they took the kids to the zoo on their wedding anniversary. Even by the standards of auto wrecks it was heart wrenching. A lot of people felt the driver was negligent and deserved prison.
there are many[0] many[1] data points like this. even if individual ones seem like outliers, when there's this many outliers, it's like there's at least two distinct lines depicting consequences, one material and one not.
those who probably have exhausted all the various escape hatches built into the "vehicular manslaughter & mutilation forgiveness program" worldwide by the automobile industry, may get a year or so in prison — usually extreme repeat offenders, high profile deaths, homicide cases, or drivers who were already criminals just having the charge thrown in.
most people who "slipped up" are just fined and forgotten, at the cost of global pedestrian safety.
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1856923/do-s...
[1]: https://gothamist.com/news/95-of-nyc-drivers-avoid-criminal-...
You are wrong. The easiest way to murder someone in America and get a slap on the wrist is to run them over in your car.
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This was just in my local news 2 days ago; it doesn't seem that strange for California:
https://www.santamariasun.com/news-2/fatal-dui-case-closes-w...
Last year I was on the jury for someone who drove drunk, caused an accident, and fled the scene. They had multiple prior DUIs but still had their license.
[edit]
Some details from the story for those who don't want to click through:
An unlicensed driver drank, did some cocaine, drove on one of the more dangerous stretches of road in the area, crossed the centerline and killed someone. Probation.
> The reason that’s a news story is because the outcome is unusual.
Yes and no.
Here in the UK, I read/post a bit on https://road.cc about road cycling and the perils of traffic and poor road designs. There's a surprising amount of clearly illegal driving that is rarely punished severely and it's notable that due to juries being motornormative, the prosecution will often not attempt to push for "dangerous driving" and will instead go or "careless driving" as it's notoriously difficult to get a jury to give a guilty verdict for "dangerous". I suspect a lot of jurors are thinking "I sometimes don't pay attention when driving, so that could have been me".
There's also a lot of media bias (I'm looking at you, BBC) with reporting of RTCs (Road Traffic Collisions - they should not be referred to as "accidents" as that is loaded language), especially when one of the participants is a cyclist. A lot of stories are framed as "car and cyclist in collision", rather than "driver and cyclist in collision" or even "car driven into cyclist" (that last one may be contentious, though I propose that it is usually factual). The issue is the use of the "passive" framing so that it doesn't give the impressions that a driver is likely to be at fault (percentage wise, driver inattention is the most likely cause of RTCs). See https://www.rc-rg.com/home for more details on reporting guidelines.
Also, most RTCs don't even merit a news report as they are so commonplace.
Freakonomics did a pod about this, titled “how to get away with murder”.
see https://sf.streetsblog.org/2026/03/06/motorist-careens-onto-... and see what the police said to the driver…
Who does it benefit if an accident ruins a second life?
What does a jail sentence deter? ("[no] gross negligence [...] wasn’t engaging in a race or sideshow, was not texting, and was not under influence")
This person was 80 years old with no criminal record, needs to pay $67400 in restitution, do 200 hours of community service, isn't allowed to drive for 3 years but "never intends to drive again". Apologised to the family of the victims. She's taking responsibility and I can't imagine forced labor at that age is fun. What more can you ask for here? The family member isn't coming back if she gets what's not unlikely to be a life sentence
Edit:
> She told a witness at the scene that she was trying to park her car when she accidentally moved her foot to the gas pedal.
This seems to happen a lot. Don't know about statistics but this happened to someone I know at 50yo (thankfully only damaged their own car minorly), and you hear it on the news with some regularity. Maybe the gas needs to be in a fundamentally different spot from the brake? We can jail the people to whom it happens, sure, but I can understand a judge using their head instead of their heart. The real solution must come either from the automotive industry or legislation
> Who does it benefit if an accident ruins a second life?
The next person they'd mow down. (Also, retribution. It's a real human need and attempts at philosophising it away degrade trust in our justice system.)
> isn't allowed to drive for 3 years
This is the wild part. No! You don't drive again!
> What more can you ask for here?
For her to have recognised her own limitations before they took lives. Failing at that, her family–or literally anyone who cared about her, and didn't want to see her spend her last years in jail–having taken initiative.
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Your full-throated defense of Mary Lau is completely beside the point (and for what it's worth, it would be a fifth life, not a "second" -- she killed an entire family of four). GP claimed that human drivers who commit vehicular manslaughter get the book; they don't.
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They intentionally moved assets to their family members to avoid liability, right?
Laws are also meant to deter bad behavior, people who aren't able to drive safely should know there will be consequences
> What does a jail sentence deter?
Other irresponsible drivers.
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How do you get from "trying to park car" to 70 miles an hour? That does not seem consistent with the geometry of the accident.
People will change their behavior. The function of prison sentences is deterrence.
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Apologised for taking lives of married couple and two babies?
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Better than the current standard for AV, which is "what floor?"
Is it? https://www.vice.com/en/article/california-dmv-suspends-crui...
Cruise was entirely shut down because of an incident that didnt even result in a death. Thats way worse than what people tend to get
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> The standard for human drivers is through the floor.
The linked article doesn't describe the standard. It describes a single, exceptional example.
It's a representative example. (When you're disputing my evidenced claim, it behooves you to bring your own facts, rather than just asserting.)
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In the US, 11 deaths per billion miles driven (or about 47k per year) is currently seen as an OK cost.
More than twice as much per mile as places like Sweden and Switzerland, and still substantially more than places like Canada, Australia or Germany (all three in the 6-8 deaths per billion miles range). So it's not like there isn't room to improve. The effort to do so just isn't seen as worth the cost at the societal or government level
Turning that into a monetary cost would change the ethics slightly, but it wouldn't be a monumental shift
The issue here is that a lot of the concerns about AV's are orthogonal to the standard metrics of concern.
I'm a strong transit alternatives advocate, but even I recognize that a firetruck or ambulance being blocked by an AV has the potential to cause an outsized amount of death and destruction, because deaths aren't always linear and a fire that is able to get out of control can do catastrophic damage compared to a single out of control vehicle.
I'm genuinely stunned that AV's do not have the ability to be "commandeered" by Police/Fire/EMS in a pinch, and I'm honestly surprised that regular citizens can't just hit a red button that signal "this is seriously an emergency." These are fairly simple steps to mitigate the tail risk of AV's but the platforms aren't going to prioritize that if there are no incentives.
We already accept that it’s fine for human drivers to block emergency services and we generally refuse to build, say, bus and bike lines that can be used by emergency services.
So the uproar over AV’s blocking emergency vehicles seems incredibly manufactured or inconsistent, much like the hoopla over AI and water.
e.g. You can take anyone complaining about this and you’ll find they didn’t care about emergency vehicles or water until just now regarding one thing. I’d like to see some consistency.
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> I'm genuinely stunned that AV's do not have the ability to be "commandeered" by Police/Fire/EMS in a pinch, and I'm honestly surprised that regular citizens can't just hit a red button that signal "this is seriously an emergency."
The passenger of a Waymo can, but not anyone outside it. There's a very prominent "call for help" button on the screen when you get inside.
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Don't forget to add rail incidents to that metric. I live in Spain, this year we had 4 derailments for a total of 48 deaths and 195 injured. The USA has had 0 passengers killed or injured from train accidents this year. Portugal had 15 death after a tram derailment. In Amsterdam, the tram is more dangerous than the car.
Also Germany is very high (for European standards) because of the Autobahn. They can save around 140 lives a year by having a limit on the Autobahn but the car lobby in Germany is very strong. Those 140 lives are seen as an OK cost just to go vroom on the Autobahn.
>I live in Spain, this year we had 4 derailments for a total of 48 deaths and 195 injured.
Which, to be clear, is a considerable outlier. Highest since 2013 and about double the deaths and 4x the injured of a "normal" year.
Not to mention that trains are far safer than automobiles too.
>The USA has had 0 passengers killed or injured from train accidents this year.
Is this a fantastic, magical year or something? The normal number seems to be around 800 a year? https://www.kochandbrim.com/study-train-accident-deaths/
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Hm, it's only something like 10% of German traffic fatalities that occur on the autobahn. And according to wikipedia, Germany doesn't rank high in terms of traffic fatalities, even by European standards. France has a similar number of highway deaths. I'm personally not a fan of the autobahn and especially not the unrestricted speed. It seems obvious that it should cause lots of fatalities, but the evidence for it just doesn't seem to be there.
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There is a reason for that “per billion miles range”.
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What. in god's name are you saying?
> Don't forget to add rail incidents to that metric. I live in Spain, this year we had 4 derailments for a total of 48 deaths and 195 injured.
Yeah and how many in the 15 years prior? 112. Of which 80 were in a single (TGV) crash.
How many people die each year in Spanish roads? Thousands.
> The USA has had 0 passengers killed or injured from train accidents this year.
Can't have rail accidents if you don't have rail *taps side of head*
> Portugal had 15 death after a tram derailment.
Oh my god, after a 140-year old tourist attraction malfunctioned! Hardly representative of any transit system whatsoever.
> In Amsterdam, the tram is more dangerous than the car.
This is just not true, by any metric.
And also, why are cars comparatively less dangerous in Amsterdam than in most other places? Because it is not designed for cars first, there are low speed limits enforced by traffic calming (like speed humps and narrow cobbled streets) everywhere.
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Coming from a bio background, I’ve always been confused why auto fatality stats are normalized per miles driven. Epidemiological metrics like incidence or prevalence seem like they would work fine? Town A would be “safer” than town B if people’s commutes are 20% shorter, even if accidents occur w same frequency
Pretty sure I've seen exposure-adjusted incidence rates used in clinical trials.
Miles is simply a proxy for exposure.
Given risk here does vary by exposure time and trip length varies so much, it seems reasonable to use - at least in combination with crude rates.
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What are some other better ways to normalize?
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Because it yields a simple corollary that to make travelling safer you can reduce the number of miles driven. Mostly by giving people viable alternatives to driving, be it long-distance rail or bike lanes to move around quicker and safer in the city.
> it's not like there isn't room to improve
Losing one's license means destitution for many Americans. That places practical limits on enforcement compared with less car-oriented countries.
I'm from Belgium, and even with public transportation, there are a large group of people dependent on their driver's license.
But if you ask someone if they'd drive without insurance, or without driver's license they look at you like you've asked them to do the impossible.
Whereas in the US no-one bats an eye when that happens. Half the time the cops just issue a ticket, and don't even tow the car.
And now people who obey the law need to take out extra insurance for under/uninsured motorists.
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> Losing one's license means destitution for many Americans.
That'd be the same for a Swede who lives in the middle of nowhere too. Although I'm sure both groups, if they'd loose their license, would continue driving anyways.
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Tons of options other than removing the ability to drive. More stringent enforcement, higher fines.
> So it's not like there isn't room to improve. The effort to do so just isn't seen as worth the cost at the societal or government level
That effort being what, exactly?
Road fatalities per mile driven don’t translate cleanly from country to country because the type of roads and even types of deaths (single vehicle, multi vehicle) are different.
We could set the speed limit at 25mph everywhere and force all vehicles to not exceed that limit and that would make the number go down, but the cost would be extreme for everyone.
So what, exactly, are the solutions you are proposing?
> That effort being what, exactly?
Off the top of my head you could do any of these or a combination.
- much stricter training and testing to get a license
- vehicles where the safety of others is considered
- ban stupid dangerous cars (my wife doesn’t stand as tall as an F350, let alone a kid
- harsher penalties for drunk driving (see Germany)
- harsher penalties for all kinds of dangerous driving
None of these are hard to implement, the US just lacks the will.
> 11 deaths per billion miles driven
You should calculate how many are "single vehicle accidents" and how many are "multiple vehicle accidents." In the US the majority are single vehicle.
> seen as an OK cost.
You cannot build a system that stops every stupid person from doing something stupid without introducing absolute tyranny.
[dead]
Doesn’t that 11 per billion statistic include commercial drivers as well? And doesn’t the United States have by far the largest percentage of commercial miles driven of any developed nation?
There’s a far cheaper solution available. Log books.
We subsidize driving by somewhat over a trillion dollars annually, mostly due to lax penalties for negligence which shift liability to drivers’ victims[1]. One way to tackle all of these problems would be requiring drivers to cover the full damages.
Another simple and effective measure would be changing fines from absolute values to a percentage of income. Right now, parking in a bike lane usually doesn’t kill anyone so drivers are only thinking there’s a small chance of a small fine, but if it was a chance of, say, 0.1% of annual income Waymo technology would magically be capable of not doing that. Add a right of private action and enforcement would be high enough to really speed things along, too, and that’d improve safety and travel times for all road users.
1. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...
Yeah, making fines relative to income would change behaviors for sure. A $20 ticket when you make $20 an hour hits different when you're making $200 or $2,000/hr. If it was a percentage of pay, then the ticket would actually sting.
There are a lot of people that just don't pay the fines and ignore suspended licenses as money stops becoming a motivator on the other end as well.
> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.
If only! "10 Days In Jail For Drunken Driver Who Killed Cyclist Bobby Cann" https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20170126/old-town/ryne-san-h...
I almost feel bad for noticing this, but:
> San Hamel was a partner in a business called AllYouCanDrink.com at the time.
…
> Cann, an experienced cyclist who once biked from New Hampshire to Chicago, was heading home from his job at Groupon the night he was killed.
It looks like allyoucandrink.com now redirects to Groupon, in a decent bit of irony.
> We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society.
There is essentially nothing to be gained from doing this because it will not in either case be manufacturer; it will be an insurance company.
If the liability is paid by the vehicle owner's insurance then things work as they do now. You buy a car, insure it, if there is a liability there is an insurance claim and then the victim has someone to pay them for their injuries. Meanwhile the manufacturers still have a financial incentive to make safer cars because buyers want neither accident prone vehicles as the one they use nor high insurance rates. The insurance rates in particular are in direct competition with the car payment for the customer's available income.
Whereas if you try to put the liability on the manufacturer, several stupider things happen.
First, they're just going to buy insurance anyway, but now the insurance cost has to be front-loaded into the purchase price, which increases costs because now you're paying car loan interest on money to cover insurance five and ten years from now, when you otherwise wouldn't have needed to pay the premiums until the time comes.
Second, what happens to cars from manufacturers who no longer exist? They can't continue paying for insurance if they're bankrupt, so you need it to be someone else. Worse, if a company produces a vehicle which is unsafe, that will tend to cause them to go bankrupt. But then people still have them, and would continue to operate them if they're allowed to point victims at the bankrupt manufacturer, whereas the incentive you want is for the premiums on those cars to go up for the vehicle owners so that they stop operating them.
> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV?
They get their licenses pulled statewide [1]. Cruise's single negligent manslaughter event carried more consequence than dozens of human cases combined.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/dmv-statement-o...
> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.
I wish this were true. Often they get off with a light punishment, or no punishment at all.
> What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?
It’s the same cost/benefit we accept under current rules. Why have cars that can go 3x the speed limit? Why not require breathalyzers in cars before starting them? Why not fine logistics companies if one of their drivers breaks the law? And so on… Because it’s worth it
>Why not require breathalyzers in cars before starting them?
FYI Cars will soon detect if you are impaired.
What tech will be used for this?
I hope it’s better than other sensor tech in cars that think they need to warn you that you’re about to hit something at the front when the car is in reverse, that can't distinguish a bike rack statically attached to the car from the environment, and so on.
Your questions are pertinent but what’s the benefit "worth" you’re referring to? The two first proposals would risk a politician popularity and the last one would be lobbied to he’ll buy the logistic companies. IMHO inconvenience isn’t worth driving among drunk coursier at 200kmh.
I also hope AV will reduce road deaths in the future but I don't think what will make the difference is regulatory. Rather the tech will advance from doesn't work to works in Waymos but is expensive to works in most cars and has become cheap.
What happens if you build a bridge and it breaks?
These people want to play god with our lives but at the same time move fast and break things. Look at software quality anywhere, it's a mess and only about to get much worse.
We should not let them. Jail time for anyone involved in any of the decision making process, applied at scale with the number of vehicles and deaths.
Why should the standards be any different? They want to change the status quo with tech only so they can get paid and extort us with yet more subscriptions.
AVs will never substantially reduce road deaths. They will optimize to just being slightly better than human, but fail in new and more unexpected ways. There is not enough incentive for them to make it safer.
If we consider fairness/retribution/justice then we won't get this future of less road deaths.
1. There will always be a probability of death from a vehicle. This can never go to 0%.
2. If the probability of a AV causing death is many magnitudes lower than human driving then that is the future we must choose.
If 1 and 2 holds and we hold AV manufactures accountable in the sense that Executives go to jail or are personal liable financially for deaths/injuries then AV will never get released or become mainstream even if this results in less total deaths. The sense of fairness/justice/retribution may make us feel better but result in more overall deaths. Logically this means that there must be a standard. Something like x deaths per y cars manufactured. If above the threshold you get big fines as a company. As technology gets better you can lower the threshold. Anything apart from causing deaths either purposefully or negligently would have be ignored.
Can we as a species accept this? That is another question.
We can look to other forms of automation to get a sense of what to do. For example, planes largely fly themselves and a loss of life due to manufacturing errors from the manufacturer would deem them liable for those deaths. Seems like the solution here is large penalties and generally broad disincentives for incurring harm.
> What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?
If AVs will save lives, we need to be sure we aren't punitive to the point of making them disappear.
Adjust the fines such that X is some acceptably large number.
The trickiest part will be figuring out how many dollars per mile driven is an acceptable cost of business..
I'd probably reserve the whole executives to jail thing to cases where you can prove negligence or something.
Societies can already reduce road deaths to nearly zero, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's fun. It's just redirecting all of the cash we spend on vehicles/cars/highways/roadways/signs/etc into public infrastructure that is all encompassing.
A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not to mention the amount we spend on gasoline, car maintenance, etc etc.
The reason I say it's fun, is because I love being on a train. First time I was able to ride one, which due to living in the good old USA wasn't until I was 23, I yelled "I'm on a train" . The Germans traveling with me weren't as into it.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS#
Just because you like trains does not mean that it is actually a solution to everyone’s problem. For example, until proper law-enforcement starts happening on public transit, nobody in my family is allowed to take it in USA (they are allowed to do so in Singapore or Japan)
We can take the LEO's that would have patrolled highways/city streets and have them patrol on public transport, same job just slightly different environment.
Can I ask why you feel that public transit is unsafe in the US?
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Full liability. It's a machine with predictable performance.
The law applied to humans needs to account for their fallibilities. Not so with a machine.
The CEO gets charged with manslaughter? I work in healthtech and the responsible individual is certainly personally liable for any harm that results from reckless behavior, it should be the same here.
Same as if someone were driving, if a person just jumps in front of your car while you're driving under the limit/sober/etc, you aren't at fault, so the AV should also not be at fault if it couldn't reasonably avoid the harm. You balance these things, benefit to society vs harm to society, and you come to an acceptable tradeoff.
Could you provide examples of healthcare executives held personally liable for harm resulting from reckless decision-making? I have never heard of such a thing happening in healthcare so framing CEO responsibility as a solution to the problem sounds like a stretch to me.
Some examples: Elizabeth Holmes got canned for lying to investors, not harming patients. Purdue Pharma plead guilty to misleading regulators and giving doctors kickbacks, not causing some hundreds of thousands of opioid deaths, but no Sackler family members were personally tried.
I work in the UK, where regulations are different, and there have been a few cases. Maybe not as many as there should be, but in theory this is something that exists in law.
> The CEO gets charged with manslaughter?
Well then forget autonomous vehicles altogether and allow the human joyride to continue, because no CEO is stupid enough to risk that.
> The CEO gets charged with manslaughter? I work in healthtech and the responsible individual is certainly personally liable for any harm that results from reckless behavior, it should be the same here.
This is in like China, yes? Certainly not in the US of A, hence Luigi and all that…
Want to reduce road deaths? Invest in public transportation.
We've had public transportation for a couple of centuries and no where has it really led to a road death free utopia. I like public transport but no harm trying something new.
I had to look up a name for this. "Utopian Fallacy."
You don't have to get rid of genuine progress just because your utopian vision has something better. The USA is on the path to autonomous vehicles. They are not on the path to public transportation excellence.
Yup. Even if "safer per mile", more cars and more miles driven will probably outweigh the benefits. And still be hazardous to cyclists and pedestrians, still make us design stupid cities (built for cars, not people), etc.
Like how electric cars were for saving the car companies, not the planet, autonomous will be the same.
Simple. Blame the owner of the vehicle. They relied on automation and it failed. They go to jail for negligent homicide (whatever flavor is appropriate). That will tank sales of any AV tech that cannot maintain standards.
People are killed by industrial equipment fairly regularly.
I'd say we actually have a perfectly functional legal framework for all of this, and the real issue is a lot of new people are about to find out it also applies to them as well.
Whether it was working well in the first place is the real question.
Now try applying this logic to elevators.
Many things already reduce road deaths and they are infinitely easier to do that driverless cars, namely: viable alternatives to driving! Trains, streetcars, bike lanes, whatever.
The legal entity driving the AV should of course be responsible in the same way as human drivers are.
My understanding is that that is already the legal situation?
Holding executives responsible for actual violence is considered promoting violence on this site and is not allowed. Cue the handwringing and moralizing from the usual suspects.
> The last hurdle is regulatory
How’d you arrive at this conclusion? Why would fleet providers accept regrettable losses? Wouldn’t the last hurdle be technical?
> The question is how to achieve fairness
What does that have to do with automotive safety?
I think jail time for executives should be table stakes. Another thing would be fines well in excess of $10 million. The fines should be defined as percentages of gross revenue, or maybe even (to target VC-funded operations that operate at a loss) percentages of gross expenses. The penalties should be such that a few crashes can put the company entirely out of business.
> hoping AV will reduce road deaths in the future.
It won't. The majority of fatalities are caused by drugs and alcohol.
> The last hurdle is regulatory.
Indeed. Compare the USAs DUI laws with any other first world country.
Then it’s an okay cost of doing business. $10 million is a lot of money and consequences for these companies are not purely legal they are also social consequences.