Liability Implications of Driverless Cars - Lucy McCormick, Henderson Chambers
18/04/16. On Valentine’s Day 2016, a ‘Google Car’ in California struck the side of a bus. This was a historic event: the first time that a self-driving car has caused a crash. There have been a handful of previous collisions, but in those cases either the Google Car was in manual mode at the time or the fault was unambiguously with the other vehicle.
While the UK does not have any Google Cars as yet, several projects testing autonomous vehicles are ongoing. Notably, the GATEway project is already testing an autonomous shuttle in public spaces in Greenwich and self-driving trucks will be tested on the M6 motorway in 2017.
Moreover, commercially available cars are becoming ever more advanced and now feature much ‘quasi-driverless’ technology. Many brands sell cars which can parallel park without human intervention, and this month Mercedes is expected to launch its new E-Class with features which will allow it to automatically overtake other cars on the motorway. The technology is improving month by month, but the first truly autonomous cars are expected to hit the consumer sector in about 2025. What are the liability implications of these developments?
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