Who's At Fault?

The road to full automation will bring several lifetimes’ worth of work for lawyers.

- Jeff Sabatini

Somewhere way off in a future California, a line of 35 computerdriven cars is trundling up Interstate 5 in a tight, wind-cheating formation at 110 mph, each car a mere two inches off the bumper of the preceding car. Now let’s say a tire blows on car 17, or an electronic glitch befalls car 7 and it locks a wheel. Passengers will be rudely awakened from their intravenous-doughnut haze, their quadruple lattes doing the old abstract impressionist bit on the headliner. Let’s hope everyone’s safe.

Or imagine a computer-controlled vehicle puttering around a city, with no one at the wheel, slowing down to pick up a passenger. Then, because of an insecure network, the car gets hacked by the Brotherhood for Authentic Mexican Cuisine, and it sails past the loading zone, whizzing at high speed into the nearby Chipotle. Or imagine a bird sails into the sensor array of a Level 5 vehicle, knocking out the car’s ability to see. Mayhem ensues.

Who is to blame? Who gets sued in these scenarios? The tire company? The software maker? The drivers who touched “Agree” on their startup screens? In all cases, we appear to be exchanging one set of understood risks for another more opaque sort. And the implications of these new risks will need to be figured out before driverless cars can operate in the real world.