[AutonomousVehicles] Who's Responsible if a Tesla on Autopilot Kills Someone?

Thu Mar 17 15:30:58 UTC 2022

Colleagues,

In the below article the defendant-driver of the crashing vehicle was
sighted.  So what if we were to prevail, and the vehicle was non-visually
accessible, and a blind person was the driver in the below article?
Accidents will happen involving both sighted and blind drivers.  This is my
primal fear around the blind-driver experience:  

Are we, as blind individuals, psychologically and financially, prepared to
bear the potential consequences, including intense media, public opinion,
and legislative blowback about blind drivers and our skills and capabilities
when serious or lethal crashes occur?  Are our attorneys also attitudinally
and experientially prepared?

To me, these are the central, most important questions of assuming blind
drivership.  And I'm not referring only to Tesla brand vehicles.  Nonvisual
control accessibility and nomenclature knowledge is only the beginning.  I
believe we will ultimately prevail as blind drivers, and that much work lies
ahead in the process.

William Meeker

Who's Responsible if a Tesla on Autopilot Kills Someone?

By Emily Rosenthal ,
 <http://www.futurity.org/> Futurity 

| MARCH 14, 2022

Courts may decide, says a professor of civil litigation.

Vehicular manslaughter charges filed in Los Angeles earlier this year mark
the first felony prosecution in the US of a fatal car crash involving a
driver-assist system.

In late 2019, Kevin George Aziz Riad's car sped off a California freeway,
ran a red light, and crashed into another car, killing the two people
inside. Riad's car, a Tesla Model S, was on autopilot.

The  Los Angeles County prosecutors filed two charges against Riad, now 27.
The case is also the first criminal prosecution of a crash involving Tesla's
autopilot function, which is found on over 750,000 cars in the US.
Meanwhile, the crash victims' family is pursuing civil suits against both
Riad and Tesla.

Tesla is careful to distinguish between its autopilot function and a
<https://www.futurity.org/fruit-bat-surveillance-navigation-1676722-2/>
driverless car, comparing its driver-assist system to the technology
airplane pilots use when conditions are clear.

"Tesla autopilot relieves drivers of the most tedious and potentially
dangerous aspects of road travel," states Tesla online. "We're building
autopilot to give you more confidence behind the wheel, increase your safety
on the road, and make highway driving more enjoyable.. The driver is still
responsible for, and ultimately in control of, the car."

The electric vehicle manufacturer clearly places the onus of safety on the
driver, but research suggests that humans are susceptible to automation
bias, an over-reliance on automated aids and decision support systems.

Now it's up to the courts to decide who is culpable when the use of those
systems results in fatal errors. Currently, Riad is out on bail and pleading
not guilty to manslaughter charges.

Here,
<https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overvi
ew&personid=19939> Mark Geistfeld, professor of civil litigation at New York
University, and the author of the new paper in the
<https://www.californialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2-Geistfeld-
34-updated.pdf> California Law Review, talks about the significance of the
criminal charges and what they might mean for the future of consumer trust
in new tech:

Q: Can you shed some light on the legal precedent the criminal prosecution
of Kevin George Aziz Riad sets? What message does it send to consumers and
manufacturers of similar technology?

A: First, the criminal charges are surprising, based on what we know-the
criminal charging documents, as usual, provide no details. Typically, if you
weren't paying attention, ran a red light and hit somebody-as tragic as it
is-you wouldn't get a criminal charge out of that behavior in the vast
majority of cases. You really don't see many criminal prosecutions for motor
vehicle crashes outside of drunk-driving cases.

If the driver was found guilty of manslaughter, this case could really be
the most disruptive, the most novel, the most groundbreaking precedent. It's
a strong departure from the past, if in fact the criminal prosecution is
simply based on his relying on autopilot when he should have taken over. If
that's what is going on, you might see a lot more criminal prosecutions
moving forward than we do today.

Tort liability, or civil charges, by contrast, is very commonplace. That's
when the defendant would pay damages for injuries caused. The majority of
tort suits in state courts across the country are from motor vehicle crashes
in which one driver is alleged to have negligently caused the crash, which
clearly occurred in this case because the driver went through a red light.

If this case somehow signals that criminal liability is more possible simply
by relying on the technology, then that could become a profound shift in the
nature of legal liabilities moving forward.

Q: What obligation does an advanced tech company such as Tesla have in
informing drivers, whether directly or through advertising and marketing
messages, that they are liable for all damages, regardless of whether the
car is on autopilot?

A: They clearly have an obligation to warn the person sitting in the
driver's seat to take over the vehicle-that it's not capable of doing
everything on its own. You see that warning in Tesla vehicles, and almost
all vehicles have that type of warning. For example, when you use a
<https://www.futurity.org/gps-route-directions-road-safety-2704542/> map
function while driving, many cars will offer a warning: "This will distract
you, pay attention to the road."

Manufacturers also have an obligation to keep in mind the sense of
complacency that comes with driving technology while designing the car.
Tesla or any other manufacturers can't just say, "Hey, pay attention, that's
your responsibility."

They actually have to try to put something into the design to make sure that
drivers are staying attentive. So different manufacturers are taking
different approaches to this problem-some cars will pull over if your hands
are not on the steering wheel, and other cars have cameras that will start
beeping if you're not paying attention.

Under current law, if the driver gets in a crash and there was an adequate
warning, and the design itself is adequate enough to keep the driver
attentive, the car manufacturer is not going to be liable. But there's one
possible exception here: there is a formulation of the liability rule that
is pretty widely adopted across the country, including in California, where
this case will take place. Under this rule, the inquiry is based on what
consumers expect the manufacturer to do. And consumer expectations can be
strongly influenced by marketing and advertising and so on.

For example, if Tesla were to advertise that autopilot never gets in a
crash, and then a consumer does get in a crash, Tesla would be liable for
having frustrated those expectations.

Q: In this case, the driver was charged based on the idea that he was
over-reliant on his car's autopilot. What does this say about our basic
assumptions about whether humans or tech are more trustworthy?

A: There's an important distinction between overreliance and complacency. I
think complacency is just a natural human reaction to the lack of
stimulus-in this case, the lack of responsibility for executing all of the
driving tasks. You can get bored and lulled into a sense of complacency, but
I don't think that behavior is being overly reliant on technology.

The idea of
<https://www.futurity.org/self-driving-cars-health-impact-2454962/>
overreliance comes into play with the potential nature of the wrongdoing
here. Maybe the driver in this case will defend himself by saying he
reasonably thought the car had everything under control, was fully capable
of solving this problem, and so he didn't have to worry about reacting if
things turned out otherwise.

Now at that point, he would be placing his faith in the technology instead
of in his own ability to stop the vehicle and get out of the problem in a
safe way. If there is blind faith in the technology rather than in taking
over when you could have done so, and if you are liable as a consequence,
that becomes a very profound, interesting kind of message that the law is
sending.

Q: Do you think this shift in liability will hurt business for companies
like Tesla?

A: The big issue that autonomous vehicle manufacturers like Tesla face right
now is gaining consumer
<https://www.futurity.org/trust-self-driving-car-timing-anxiety-2092272/>
trust when they're introducing a new technology to the market. The need for
trust in the early stages of these products is massively important. And all
the manufacturers are worried about that problem because they know that if
there are some horrific crashes, consumers are going to lose trust in the
product.

Ultimately the technology will end up taking over; it's just a question of
whether it's sooner rather than later. And time is money in this context-so
if you just get slower adoption because consumers are very concerned about
the safety performance of the technology, that's going to hurt the industry.
They obviously want to avoid that outcome. This technology is still going to
take over-it's just a question of how long it takes for that to happen.
There are just so many advantages to using autonomous vehicles, including in
the safety dimension.

Q: Of its autopilot and full self-driving capability, Tesla says: "While
these features are designed to become more capable over time, the currently
enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous." What liability issues
do you foresee if/when these vehicles do become autonomous?

A: It's a complicated question, and that is the issue that everybody is
interested in. Once these vehicles become fully autonomous, then there's
just the car. The human in the car isn't even an element in the situation.

So the big question is: once those vehicles crash,
<https://www.futurity.org/self-driving-car-regulation-1712832/> who pays?
You'd think the manufacturer would be liable-and that's going to increase
the cost of these vehicles and make them a lot harder to distribute. There
are a lot of people who think that in the event of a crash, the manufacturer
should be liable all of the time. I am strongly skeptical about that
conclusion, because I think it's a much closer call than most people make it
out to be.

Ultimately, these issues depend on how federal regulators like the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulate the vehicle. They will have
to set a safety performance standard which the manufacturer has to satisfy
before it can commercially distribute the product as fully autonomous.

The question is where the regulators set that standard at, and I don't think
it's easy to get right. At that point there will be a good debate to be had:
Did they get it right or not? We're still a few years out. I think we'll all
be having these conversations in 2025.

This article was originally published in  <https://www.futurity.org/>
Futurity. It has been republished under the
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/> Attribution 4.0 International
license.

Emily Rosenthal is a contributing writer at Futurity. 

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