There's the simple issue of legal liability, though. If you crash into someone, it's your fault and you can be taken to court for it. If a Google driverless car crashes into someone then it's Google's fault. That's an extremely large number of potential crashes and legal challenges.
Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.
I hear people fretting about liability as a "problem to overcome," but it's actually much simpler than the technical challenges.
People have to drive the same distance regardless. Whether it's human or computer error leading to the accident is irrelevant to your premium. To a car insurance company it's all about rates and risks.
Assuming driverless cars are shown to be safer than humans - and they'll have to be in order to get approval - your car insurance company would be stupid not to cover them. From their perspective it's simple economics. The accident rate is lower, thus the potential liability is lower.
If your insurer isn't willing to insure your driverless car, you'll switch to someone who does. If no established provider insures driverless, that's a no-brainer company to start. Similar payments in a high-margin industry with lower average payouts? Yes, please.
The problem is your insurance company. If you get in an accident, they're not going to want to pay for it, and they're going to go after Google for the damages. Now we're right back where we started.
No. Current driver-based insurance policies might be based on the ability to hold the driver personally responsible if they are negligent.
Insuring a vehicle is just figuring out what the likely payout ratio across a cohort of those vehicles is going to be, then working backwards from there to come up with a premium that will cover the claim amounts, administrative costs and provide a pool of funds to invest.
Lots of things are insured today with no interest in who is operating them. Automated cars are no different to that.
Essentially you're imaging a current situation (where a driver is insured) and transferring that to a situation with no driver. That's wrong.
Insurance companies don't care - they just want to be able to predict what the likely payout rate is. And that's how much it will cost. If that includes cover for buggy code, it just means a higher premium. Essentially younger drivers have buggier driving code, and that's why they cost more to insure.
Also, in terms of regulatory capture, it's almost certain that the legal requirement to hold insurance for your car will continue. But the combination of the fact that payouts will probably move towards class action against software bugs (where class action suits usually have a lower per-person payout, and will be paid out by massive policies held by the car companies) and the fact that in general fewer of those people will ever need a payout thanks to safety improvements (especially as we move into most cars on city roads being driverless) will mean insurance companies will have to pay out less.
I will never understand why people think insurance companies will be a barrier to adoption. Insurance companies are going to love this. I think the tipping point will be when insurance rates on driving your own car skyrocket.
>I will never understand why people think insurance companies will be a barrier to adoption. Insurance companies are going to love this. I think the tipping point will be when insurance rates on driving your own car skyrocket.
Yes. The logic goes like this. 'Currently I'm an insured driver'. I will have a car with no driver. It therefore cannot be insured.
Where I live cars are already insured for third-party personal damages, regardless of who is driving them. It's a fixed-cost premium attached and paid at vehicle registration time. Thus, if you are injured in a motor vehicle accident, regardless of who is at fault, you (or your heirs) will be paid compensation in a regulated environment. This is a functioning market which doesn't adjust for driver age or experience, but instead collectively insures all vehicles on the road, and pays out when a claim is made. Periodically, when more than one insurer is involved, they will negotiate an 'at fault' percentage in order to work out which ratio at which the claims are attributed to each insurer. This may involve discussion of the drivers actions (to determine fault), but the payout is always made - because the vehicle itself is the thing that is insured.
In this system, the only way the driver can become liable for the claim is if they specifically and deliberately engaged in a criminal act, such as driving an unregistered vehicle, or driving under influence. Mere speeding or red-light running doesn't void the insurance (as these are traffic infringements rather than criminal acts). And in these cases, the insurance company still pays out the compensation, but may proceed to recover the compensation from the driver that broke the law.
This type of system would easily be translated to driverless vehicles. The owner of the vehicle would pay a registration fee, and a portion of that fee would be passed onto the owners choice of insurer (or a valid certificate of insurance would need to be presented for registration, which is the same thing). As long as the insurance was paid, then third-party personal and property damage would be paid out to any accident claimants. If the insurance company then decided someone was directly liable for causing the claim (such as tampering with vehicle systems or negligent coding) then they could recover the claim money.
Such a system would be a vast improvement on the current situation, whereby it's the driver that is insured, and because of the various risk factors, insurance premiums are all over the place. As a result, the riskiest drivers also tend to be the ones lacking insurance, which is the worst case for someone who needs to make a claim.
But then insurance is one of the most misunderstood products around, so I guess it's not surprising that ignorance of how it works abounds.
I don't understand why you think this. Yes, for small incidents, it won't be an issue, but if there's ever a claim over $X (where X is a figure that outweighs the cost of the time to hire lawyers to seek compensatory damages for that claim), you can bet they'll go right after the maker.
Why couldn't Google just offer their own insurance plan? They could bundle the cost with a monthly or yearly service/maintenance fee. If the margins are so high on insurance products, I'm sure they would be more than happy to keep the profits themselves.
Is this actually a real problem? There is a robust insurance environment around cars, with a huge amount of both pricing experience, case law, and experience with payouts for people injured in accidents. There is also plenty of experience with recalls and fatal manufacturing flaws.
Is there any reason to believe that insurance companies won't just happily write policies priced for automated cars, and everything will proceed pretty much like it does now? You drive around, accidents happen, insurance companies pay out to the injured parties, and adjust the rates on automatic cars to match the real cost to operate?
Legal liability seems to be a red herring IMHO. At the end of the day, it's an insurance company that pays for it all anyway, regardless of whose fault it is. And car insurance companies already have the capability to adjudicate and litigate a large number of crash-related legal challenges. If anything, Google could use the data collected by its autonomous vehicles to streamline that process.
If I were Google, I would just make some kind of deal with an insurance company to handle all scenarios where a crash occurs when a vehicle is in autonomous mode and bundle said insurance in with the cost of the vehicle.
Exactly. Who's at fault in a self-driving car crash? The car model+software combination (unless the driver explicitly did something negligent or reckless). But the insurance company will cover it, and simply adjust the cost of insurance each year based on how often that model+software combination crashed in the previous year.
Should you step in front of a Googlecar and get hurt, remember before you sue that it bristles with sensors and recording devices, and that it'll all be admissible in court.
Liability should be pretty simple. Just like now, the owner of the car is liable. In my state this is the case even if someone else is driving; not sure this is the case elsewhere but that would seem to apply to a computer driver as well as a human one. The logic is, if you allow someone else to use your property and they cause damage with it, you are liable.
Insurance (assuming the owner has it in force) may pay, but the liability still rests with the owner.
I'm thinking there could be an agreement you sign when the car is purchased that states that the self-driving abilities are not to be fully relied on and the driver must be fully aware and ready to take over at all times. Thus if the car ever crashed by fault of Google they can say the driver should have been paying attention. This would have a lot of downsides. For instance, DWI's would still be a thing.
Getting humans to participate only in emergencies is almost the worst of all approaches. With reduced practice the human is deskilled and they are less likely to be alert and aware of the situation if they have to take over suddenly.
Signing an agreement will not make people alert and ready.
Even ignoring the issue of the driver's skill reducing as they practice less, switching from the thing with microsecond-range reaction times to the thing with second-range reaction time when an emergency has already started will almost never result in an optimal outcome.
This is not simple issue at all. Who's at fault if anti-lock brakes don't work as expected? What about cruise control? The new cruise control that auto-follows? What about lane-following technology?
We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.
> We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.
Well "shift" implies that it must be one place or the other; in reality, liability is not zero-sum, so one party having reduced liability doesn't imply another party has more, and vice versa.
This is particularly the caseWe are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.
In the case of automotive systems, there's no reason the driver, owner, and manufacturer all can't be liable, and no reason that any changes in the degree of liability for one have to be reflected at all in the liabilities of the others.
I think this will eventually be resolved the way vaccines were with liability shifted to government. There's just too much societal good to come out of self driving cars for liability to be the deal breaker.
Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.