Should something go wrong when a vehicle is being autonomously driven, who is to blame? A joint report issued by the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission aims to work towards clarity on that front, reports Autocar.
The report was commissioned by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in 2018, and is the result of three consultations between 2018 and 2021 with inputs from “hundreds of stakeholders” from across the automotive industry, as well as from other sectors, it said.
A clear distinction should be drawn between features which just assist drivers, such as adaptive cruise control, and those that are self-driving,” the report was quoted as saying.
The latest recommendations are built on law reforms introduced by the 2018 Automated and Electric Vehicles Act, which set out to ensure that victims of self-driving car crashes did not have to prove that anyone was at fault, and would be compensated directly by the insurer, Autocar reported.
The overall recommendation of the report is to introduce a dedicated automated vehicles act, which would see introduction of a new legal framework specifically to work with cars that are capable of being autonomously driven. “The driver can no longer be the principal focus of accountability for road safety” in situations where there are not in control of the vehicle themselves, the commissions said.
This ultimately means that the human driver of a road vehicle, whenever it is self-driving, would not be responsible for the vehicle’s actions. Instead, responsibility for due care in the operation of the vehicle would then go to an authorised self-driving entity (ASDE), which is the company or body that had obtained authorisation for the use of the autonomous driving technology.
Under the terms of the proposed rules, the person in the driver’s seat would no longer be conventionally held responsible as a driver normally would, and therefore cannot be charged for “offences which arise directly from the driving task,” such as dangerous driving, speeding and running red lights.
In the event of an incident or infraction of rules, the ASDE, which is the vehicle manufacturer or the developer of the vehicle’s autonomous driving software, would work with a regulatory body to avoid a repeat occurence, and these entities could face sanctions.
For vehicles that are appropriately certified as fully self-driving, all of its occupants would be classified as passengers, with a licensed operator responsible for safe transit, said the joint report. More importantly, the report called for driver assistance features to be marketed separately from actual self-driving capability, which “would help to minimise the risk of collisions caused by members of the public thinking that they do not need to pay attention to the road while a driver assistance feature is in operation,” it added.
This is to prevent instances of driver assistance systems potentially misleading users with claims of fully autonomus driving, such as when Tesla’s Autopilot came under scrutiny in Germany in 2020.
At the time, German non-profit organisation The Centre for Protection Against Unfair Competition sued Tesla for overpromising and under-delivering to its customers, and a lawyer representing the firm said that many Autopilot functions have yet to work as advertised.
“In our view, a vehicle should only be authorised as self-driving if it is safe even if an individual is not monitoring the driving environment, the vehicle or the way it drives,” the law commissions said in their joint statement.
“A senior individual must take responsibility for the accuracy of the information supplied, and could face prosecution it if is incorrect or incomplete. Other senior managers could also be liable if they consented or connived at the offence,” the statement continued, saying that it should also be an offence for ASDEs and fleet operators to withhold information or make representations about their vehicles that have implications for safety.
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