Who's Liable? Driverless Cars and Products Liability - Brookings

Who's Liable? Driverless Cars and Products Liability

Published on Apr 24, 2014

Brookings Senior Fellow John Villasenor explains how existing products liability law provides the legal foundation to address concerns raised by vehicle automation without delaying consumer access to the benefits that autonomous vehicles will provide.

Who Is at Fault When a Driverless Car Gets in an Accident? - John Villasenor - The Atlantic

Products Liability and Driverless Cars: Issues and Guiding Principles for Legislation | Brookings Institution

1. Preemptively resolving liability issues should not be a precondition to commercial rollout of autonomous vehicles.
2. Products liability law has proven to be remarkably adaptive to new technologies. 
3. Congress should not preempt state tort remedies with respect to autonomous vehicle liability.
4. Manufacturers of non-autonomous vehicles should not be liable for alleged defects introduced through third party conversions into an autonomous vehicle.
5. In the long term, federal attention to safety standards for autonomous vehicles will be needed, and those standards will have liability implications.
6. Liability related to autonomous commercial motor vehicles should, at least in part, be addressed federally.     

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