Drivers should not be legally responsible for road safety when travelling in the autonomous cars of the future, according to the law commissions for England and Wales, and Scotland.
According to the report published today, drivers should be defined in law as as a ‘user-in-charge’. In the event of a crash, the car maker or provider of the software would be held responsible. The news prompted politics and transport journalist, Peter Walker, to say “This is deeply alarming, and shows the many, many ethical and legal problems that autonomous cars will bring. They’re not needed; they’re not the answer; they won’t work.”
- a ‘user-in-charge’ cannot be prosecuted for offences arising directly from the driving task, such as dangerous driving, speeding or running a red light, but remains responsible for other tasks, including insurance and checking people are wearing seatbelts
- some vehicles may be allowed to drive themselves with no-one in the driving seat and a licensed operator responsible for overseeing the journey
- data to understand fault and liability following a collision must be accessible
- sanctions for carmakers who fail to reveal how their systems work
The government has responded by saying it will ‘fully consider’ the recommendations.
Driverless cars – too good to be true?
If you think all the claims surrounding driverless cars sound too good to be true, you’re not alone. Christian Wolmar is an award-winning writer and broadcaster specialising in transport: “People say we’ve got 1.25m people killed on the world’s roads every year across the world – we will remove that danger – remove it with this technology. I’m not sure these driverless cars will ever be developed in the way that they envisage. There’s no guarantee that they actually will be safer. They will still have software that is programmed by human beings. The cars will still be on the roads in potential collisions.”
Christian Wolmar appears in our crowdfunded documentary Stop Killing our Children, which can be viewed in full on Vimeo
There are good reasons to be sceptical about the claims made by evangelists for a high-tech car future. Car companies will have you believe they are here to help – by designing for us products that are seemingly environmentally benign and even ‘uncrashable’. These empty promises are a distraction.
Talk of driverless cars is less about transforming the status quo than maintaining it, fudging any path to progress. We need fewer cars, not fewer drivers.
The ethical choice
The ETA was established in 1990 as an ethical provider of green, reliable travel services. Over 30 years on, we continue to offer cycle insurance, breakdown cover and mobility scooter insurance while putting concern for the environment at the heart of all we do.
The Good Shopping Guide judges us to be the UK’s most ethical provider.
Tony Williams
I think I can appreciate the logic behind the Law Commission’s conclusions. However, there are (at least) two problems.
When there is an accident, it will be difficult and expensive for an individual to challenge successfully a large car manufacturer which will naturally not wish to concede that its system contributed to the crash.
If an investigation after a crash concludes that the car manufacturer’s system was at fault in some way, it may be logical to insist that all cars that employ that system should be taken off the road until it has been suitably modified. Manufacturers won’t like that, but neither will the owners of those cars who won’t be able to use them for an unspecified period.
I know that we don’t usually go that far with the sort of fault that may emerge nowadays, which results in the manufacturer issuing a recall notice. But it would the logical step to take in the future, if the manufacturer and not the “person in charge” is responsible for the consequences of a fault. It might be possible for the car to be driven manually until the manufacturer has fixed the fault, but there will be an increasing number of motorist who have forgotten how to drive, if they have been relying on the autonomous vehicle to do the work.
It’s one thing to set up a new and undoubtedly necessary legal framework, but there will still be many practical issues that will arise if cars are allowed to drive themselves.