Cars operate mostly on public roads, and they are dangerous: Cars are massive machines that move at high velocity, and they result in more than 40,000 deaths a year.
For these reasons, cars are naturally very regulated.
Self-driving cars are just coming onto the market in significant numbers, so the regulatory framework will have to be changed at the state and federal levels.
Different industry and advocacy groups have been hashing out legislation to establish this framework. Lawmakers from both parties have been getting closer to a good compromise measure. The biggest opposition, according to all reports, is coming from the trial lawyers.
The American Association of Justice (formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers of America) has been lobbying on this matter, and earlier this year opposed the bipartisan SELF DRIVE Act, arguing “It eliminates all legal accountability for AV failures and collisions” and “strips away victims’ fundamental rights, limiting their right to seek justice.”
In short, victims need to know whom to sue if they get injured by a self-driving car. This is a reasonable-sounding objection, and one you’d expect to hear from the folks who do the suing.
But Democratic and Republican lawmakers both say they’ve bent over backward to address the lawyers’ valid concern.
Check out this report from Government Technology magazine:
“Speaking during a hearing of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., placed blame for the roadblock mostly on trial lawyers, who typically align with Democrats.
‘It should be clear from the history of this process that Republicans and Democrats on this panel worked very hard with your organization to get sign off and support when we first moved this bill,” Walden said. “So you might imagine my disappointment when you all asked for more changes in the Senate, despite the deal we had here in the House with your organization.’
‘But it was even more curious that when Senate Republicans and Democrats ceded to the provisions you were seeking, you still didn’t support the deal,’ Walden continued.”
In other words, the trial lawyers seem dead set on sinking the bill, rather than passing a better bill. This would suggest that the trial lawyers don’t just want to set up a good liability system for self-driving cars — they want to block wide adoption of self-driving cars.
Why would trial lawyers want to block self-driving cars?
Check out this post from Alex Tabarrok:
“Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries.… The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents–Annual U.S. auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220B.”
One doesn’t want to be too cynical, but it is striking that the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of safer cars is the industry that profits when people get injured or killed in car accidents.