Legal liability issues ‘preventing mass adoption of self-driving cars’

LEIPZIG (Germany) — The technology may already be in place, but the mass adoption of autonomous vehicles is at least a few decades away because of legal liability issues that need to be sorted out.

At the International Transport Forum held in Leipzig, Germany, yesterday, Mr Clemens Klinke presented a report on strategies in preventing accidents and cited an example of the sort of judgment call that could arise on the roads and result in legal issues that would take at least 15 to 20 years to resolve.

He cited the case of a moral situation where a woman suddenly pushes a pram across the road into the path of a self-driving car. Should the computer choose to swerve into oncoming traffic, or save the passenger by crashing into the woman?

“It’s not a technical question but a legal question ... Until now we still don’t have an answer to this: Who is responsible for driving the (self-driving) car, the driver or the assistance?” said Mr Klinke, who is a member of the management board of Dekra SE, a wholly-owned subsidiary of German vehicle inspection firm Dekra.

He was presenting his company’s Road Safety Report 2015, which looked at strategies in preventing accidents. The report noted that “neither the available and foreseeable vehicle and infrastructure technology, nor the legal framework can make a scenario where vehicles can drive anywhere autonomously all the time a reality over the next 15 to 20 years”.

Many cars are already equipped with semi-automated features such as lane-keeping assistance, vehicle dynamics control, emergency braking and adaptive cruise control, said Mr Klinke. And the technology available makes it possible for driverless vehicles today to ply motorways, given that these are long stretches of uninterrupted roads.

In urban cities like Singapore, however, this becomes almost impossible, he added. The roads would be dense with different stakeholders and competing road users, including driverless cars, normal cars, bicycles and pedestrians.

In a separate panel session, though, Ms Sarah Hunter, head of public policy at Google X, a facility run by Google dedicated to making major technological advancements, said she does not think legal issues will be “such a big blocker” as some people might think.

“The courts and insurance companies have dealt with gradual autonomy being introduced into cars very successfully within the existing legal framework,” she said. “ ... I think it’s a very interesting philosophical, social discussion, but I think in practice the courts will manage to resolve these issues.”