Who is responsible when the wheel is in the car's hands?

Ahead of the day when cars will drive themselves, vehicle manufacturers committed to their technology are taking responsibility for damages

By Corinne Yotsio, The article is published with the approval of Scientific American Israel and the Ort Israel network,

February 14, 2016, Valentine's Day, was not a good day in Mountain View, California. This was the first time that one of Google's autonomous cars caused an accident. The Lexus autonomous vehicle, which was adapted for self-driving, located a pile of sandbags around a drainage opening in the lane it was traveling on. To get around the obstacle, he moved to the middle lane, and three seconds later he collided with the side of a bus. According to the accident report, the test driver sitting in the Lexus saw the bus but assumed the bus driver would slow down to allow the car to continue on its way.

This wasn't the first collision under the project, but it was the first accident that wasn't caused entirely by human error: most of the other accidents were caused by human drivers not paying attention to traffic lights and crashing into autonomous cars from behind. This incident turned the spotlight on a gray and troubling area in the robotic future ahead: who is responsible, and who should pay for the damage, when autonomous vehicles are involved in road accidents?

The need to find clear answers to this question, and similar ones, is becoming more and more urgent. Car manufacturers and policy makers in the US fear that the lack of regulations at the national level will make the operation of autonomous cars all over the US an almost impossible task. To encourage progress, the Obama administration asked the US Department of Transportation to propose national standards for vehicle tests and safety as early as the summer of 2016. But as far as the question of responsibility is concerned, an answer that expresses a change in relation to the causes of the damages may already be emerging. Experts say that when a computer drives the car instead of a human driver, the companies behind the software and hardware are the ones who bear the legal responsibility, not the car owners or their insurance companies. It is inevitable that the car manufacturers are the ones who will ultimately have to bear the responsibility.

Pioneering companies in the field of self-driving are indeed starting to accept this change. In October 2015, Volvo announced that it intends to pay for any injury to the body or property caused by its autonomous driving system, IntelliSafe Autopilot, intended to be installed in cars that the company will start marketing towards 2020. Eric Koling, the senior technical director for safety and driver-support technologies at Volvo, explains that the logic behind the decision is that the system includes a lot of redundancy and backup: the cameras, radar systems, batteries, brakes, computers and steering motors will be They are all doubles. The human driver will never be required to intervene and therefore it will not be possible to be blamed for the accident. "In any case of a malfunction in any system, the car will always be able to bring itself to a safe stop," says Kolling.

The growing number of vehicles that travel on the roads and already include partial automation today is evidence of the speed with which the scenario described by Koling will be realized. More and more cars are equipped with braking mechanisms to prevent collisions that rely on optical systems to detect dangers of a frontal collision and activate the brakes in such cases. Audi, BMW And other manufacturers have developed cars capable of maneuvering themselves into a free parking space parallel to the sidewalk. 2017 models of Volvo S90 sedans will include for the first time in the US a semi-autonomous system called Pilot assist for driving on highways. The system, which will be installed on the windshield and will include computers, a camera and a radar, will be able to make the car accelerate, decelerate, bypass obstacles and stay on track at a speed of up to 130 km/h.
professor Bryant Walker Smith from the University of South Carolina, a technology policy expert, calls the place where technologies like Pilot Assist are found "soft intermediate automation": a technological range where car manufacturers still require human drivers to pay attention to what's going on. "It is not always clear where the line between man and machine is," he says.

For now, some car manufacturers intend to leave the human drivers clearly on the side of the border where they are the ones who bear the responsibility. system and its name Super cruise of General Motors, which will be launched in Cadillac cars in 2017 and works similarly to Pilot Assist, comes with caveats: the driver must remain alert to his surroundings and be ready to take the wheel in situations of poor visibility or when the weather changes for the worse. Volvo also imposes a similar responsibility on drivers who use Pilot Assist. Touch sensors on the steering wheel ensure that the driver stays involved in what is happening.

But car manufacturers such as Volvo, Mercedes and Google express confidence that by the time fully autonomous driving becomes a reality, these and other technologies will reach a level that will make it possible to take the driver out of the picture completely, and completely change reality in terms of responsibility for what happens. Furthermore, a 2014 study by the Brookings Institution found that existing legislation essentially already covers the change, so in the US no law would need to be rewritten to allow automation to continue to advance.

From the point of view of autonomous car manufacturers, taking full responsibility for any damage, from fender benders to violent collisions, is a pretty safe bet. This is in light of the experience with semi-autonomous driving which has already shown that the driving safety level of computers is higher than that of human drivers. data of The Insurance Institute for Safety on Main Roads, for example, show that collision avoidance systems can reduce the total number of rear-end collisions by 40%. Eric Kolling of Volvo says that a study of a European version of Pilot Assist showed that the computer kept a safer distance from the vehicles in front of it, and had to brake hard less times, than human drivers.

Bryant Smith says that in the long term, "what is expected for manufacturers is that they will have to bear a larger share of the liability pie that we all hope will be much smaller."