QOTD: Can You Blame Self-Driving for Crashes?

by Tim Healey

Published: September 4th, 2024

This afternoon's story about a woman accused of killing two people while intoxicated behind the wheel of a Ford with BlueCruise is downright dystopian.

The woman's defense is essentially that the car caused the crash, not the driver, since an autonomous system was activated.

Matt did a nice job laying it all out, including the philosophical and legal questions at hand. Since it's a natural story for a QOTD, I wanted to piggyback off of that.

If you're a lawyer, feel free to weigh in on the legal implications and questions.

I am very much not a lawyer, but I can at least think through the philosophical questions. The main one being -- is the driver at fault if he or she activates an autonomous driving system and it fails?

Personally, I would say yes, especially given the state of the tech today. Once again, I must remind you that there are no truly self-driving cars on the road today. True self-driving would be Level 5 autonomy, and nothing on the market is at that level.

So, if a human is supposed to be paying attention and ready to intervene when the system fails, then he or she is still responsible, in my view. And, of course, should not be intoxicated behind the wheel.

It will get thornier if the industry ever achieves Level 5 autonomy, though. That's a tougher call.

So, what say you? Sound off below.

[Image: Ford Motor Company]

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Tim Healey

Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.

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2 of 42 comments

Ash78 on Sep 06, 2024
I don't think it'll hold up to scrutiny, the drunk driver is still the "decider" as W once declared himself. But I do hope this opens up a discussion on precedent around how, ultimately, a Level 4-5 FSD vehicle has to be coded with cost/benefit decisions that might come down to protecting occupants vs pedestrians, for example. Someone had to make THAT decision, even if one day it ends up being a "machine learned" decision. Then it gets even hairier because who is accountable for AI decisions once they're making their own decisions? Do humans even have accountability after the fact if they weren't part of the specific decision?

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Jmanb52 on Sep 09, 2024
In this case clearly a driver responsbile for the accident. Lawyer just trying to add confusion to jude and or jury to think about it. I was on a jury once for an auto accident and one of the attorneys tried a few stunts to shift blame. Same thing is happening here. The companies pushing autonamous want to deal with fleet markets like the autonamous taxi companies rather than individual consumers. In my opinion I think they belvie that would be more predictable sales. Car gets to xyz milage time to replace. In my opinion they could never sell a full autonamous car to an individual because of a back and forth legal battles between owner and maker when there is a crash. They need to foget about all these take over driver aids. It is just causing more issues than it could prevent.

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