Who is liable if you collide with a driverless car?

On behalf of Aiken and Aiken P.C. Personal Injury Attorneys posted in Car Accidents, on Friday, May 15, 2015

Automobile technology has been advancing in recent years that presages the “driverless car”. Cars can now parallel park themselves, and the latest innovations include cars that monitor your blind spots for you, tell you when you are deviating out of your lane, and in some imminent collision situations will even stop themselves if you do not hit the brakes in time. It is only a matter of time before technology matures sufficiently to take you out of the driving picture altogether. In fact, the Internet company Google is one of six companies that has prototype driverless cars on the road right now, working out the bugs in the technology that will ultimately render you obsolete as a driver.But as with any new technology, there are typically teething troubles. And driverless cars are no exception. Google has admitted recently that its driverless vehicles have been involved in 11 accidents. The company is being tight-lipped about the details of these collisions, claiming that none involved injuries and that in each case the driverless car was not at fault. But with the exception of three instances in which it was required to submit accident reports, Google has not released the details of the other eight accidents — including whether any of them took place in Massachusetts. Multi-car accidents often involve questions of whether one or more of the drivers was negligent. But when there is no driver, does the issue of negligence go away? Probably not. When the day comes that a driverless car is involved in an accident that causes property damage or injury, the question of negligence will almost certainly go to the company behind the technology that makes it possible for the car to drive itself. Simply because the driver will eventually be taken out of the equation — Google anticipates making vehicles with no steering wheel and no foot pedals — does not mean that fault for accidents will also be eliminated. Personal injury attorneys will need to become more flexible in identifying how advanced technology can fail, and who is behind that technology, to ensure that their clients will still be able to seek recompense when they find themselves in an accident with another vehicle that has only passengers.В Source: The Boston Globe, “Google says self-driving cars were involved in 11 accidents,” Justin Pritchard, May 11, 2015