Legal Challenges of Autonomous Driving

On September 25th earlier this year, California became the third state in the US, following Nevada and Florida, to pass legislation in allowing the operation of driverless cars on the road. Two short years earlier, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab director Sebastian Thrun unveiled that Google had created the world’s first autonomous car. In testing, the cars, which were manned by trained operators, drove around California, from Mountain View to Santa Clara and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They successfully navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, and even made it around Lake Tahoe. The test cars logged over 140,000 miles in total. The following year, Thrun gave a TED talk explaining how autonomous cars could save lives, time, and fuel:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported 32,885 motor vehicle deaths in 2010, the leading cause of death among teenagers. Furthermore, the majority of car accidents can be attributed to driver error and other human factors (from 57% to as high as 90%) that would not be present in driverless cars.