Autonomous Vehicles: A Case Study of Liability and Insurance
The crash of a vehicle operating in semi-autonomous or fully autonomous mode presents a headline-grabbing opportunity to question the technology and the pace at which it is being introduced. Every accident resulting in injury or death is a tragedy. In the case of new technology that offers the possibility of dramatically reducing the total number of injuries and deaths, it will be important to look at any individual crash in the context of the overall promise of the technology. For example, it will be important to know how many miles of autonomous driving took place before the first crash occurred and compare that to ordinary cars, where the national average is one fatality every 94 million miles, and the worldwide average is a fatality every 60 million miles.
For our purposes, a crash also presents a scenario for how liability and insurance issues may play out as these cars and trucks start appearing on the road in greater numbers. We’ll walk through what won’t change, and the few things that might.
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