While experts debate how quickly autonomous vehicles (AVs) will take over our roads, there is little doubt they will be a fixture in the next decade. Fully self-driving vehicles are predicted to substantially reduce the accident rate, given the dominant role of human error in most crashes today.
But there still will be accidents. And
We first began studying the implications of self-driving cars, or “AVs”, two years ago. At that time, observers predicted that fully autonomous “Level 5” cars (i.e., a car with no steering wheel) would not appear in significant numbers until 2030. In 2015, Lux Research observed:
Fully autonomous driving may happen by 2030, but only in highly restricted environments and likely only at low speeds.
That prediction now appears to be well off-target. The world may not be ready for the pace at which AVs come to dominate city streets.
Continue Reading The Future Has Arrived for Self-Driving Cars
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.
Continue Reading Autonomous Vehicles: A Case Study of Liability and Insurance