Recent news from various car manufacturers seems to suggest that the introduction of self-driving cars to our roads is imminent, despite many urgent questions still looming over their arrival. With the sudden announcement from Nissan that they would like to see their self-driving cars on our roads by 2020, it’s time to look at the legal issues to overcome

The main issue is undoubtedly accident liability, and the many grey areas around this. We’ve attempted to shed some light on these below:

Who's liable?

This is perhaps the biggest obstacle that self-driving cars currently face before they can be safely introduced to our roads.

Volvo recently announced that they would accept full responsibility for all accidents involving their self-driving cars. However bold and admirable this gesture from the car giants may seem, it simply doesn’t seem plausible in the long term. Although we don’t fully know to what extent humans will be able to interfere with the vehicles, or if there will be an override system in place, this move from Volvo would suggest that any accident involving a self-driving car would not involve any element of human error, and would be 100% the fault of the manufacturer. Which brings us to our next point…

Human error

One of the easiest ways to currently identify accident liability is by assessing the level of human error involved in the incident. If one driver is clearly demonstrating poor driving skills, is under the influence of alcohol or is sleeping at the wheel, then they would be considered liable.

With self-driving cars, this scenario becomes a bit more difficult to analyze. Being asleep and drinking alcohol at the wheel are currently two of the biggest selling points of self-driving cars, but if an accident involving two self-driving cars involves one sober driver and one drunk driver, who will the law favour?

This will again depend on the level of control and override abilities that the drivers will have access to, but human error will become extremely difficult to measure and assess in these scenarios, making it hard to identify who is responsible.

Self-driving vs Manual

This is an issue that has perhaps not been as carefully considered as it initially should have been. When self-driving cars eventually become commercially available, there will only be a select amount of people who will be able to afford to own one of the vehicles. This will lead to our roads being shared by self-driving cars and manual cars at the same time. If these two types of vehicles become involved in an accident, it will be complicated to assess where the liability lies.

The manual driver is far more susceptible to human error than the self-driving car, but that doesn’t mean that the manual driver will always be responsible. However, we fear that as more self-driving cars are introduced to our roads, cases involving accidents between the two types of vehicles will become increasingly difficult for manual drivers to win.

The arrival of self-driving cars to our roads will undoubtedly help to save millions of lives through the accidents that they prevent every single day, and will be regarded as a successful breakthrough. But regardless of how well developed a technology is, accidents are inevitable (particularly if there is a drunk/ sleeping human sitting at the wheel). The root of the problem here is that, despite reports of drivers not having to be alert at the wheel of a self-driving car, the driver is still ultimately responsible for the vehicle. However, measuring this responsibility, and identifying human error vs machine error, are the real challenges that anybody involved with road traffic accidents will face.

Author: Sam Williamson

Flying Scot Glasgow

DISCLAIMER: This article should not be regarded as constituting legal advice in relation to particular circumstances. This article is merely a general comment on the relevant topic.