In Germany you are always liable for all damage your car does, no matter whether it is caused by your own mistakes or because of a technical failure. This might not seem fair but the second piece to this puzzle is that you are also forced to have insurance.

Making it clear and unmistakable who is liable makes sure that it is always clear who has to pay for the damage done by cars. The insurance makes sure that whoever is liable can also actually pay. That way the victims don’t get left with the costs (no matter how much money the liable person has) and for the liable person accidents don’t turn into life-destroying events.

This is a working system and I see no reason why it wouldn’t work with driverless cars.

(Even if you want to change it and switch liability from the owner to the manufacturer, that’s not really an insurmountable problem. The solution is – as always – called insurance. Google would just have to insure every car they sell. That’s no big deal, seeing as cars are already pretty much all insured. The cars would get more expensive but the cost of ownership would decrease since it wouldn’t be necessary any longer to pay for insurance. Such a change would be pretty pointless, though. It would only serve to switch around who pays. In the end, though, the owner still has to bear the costs.)

The concept of "damage my car does" becomes murky if an infrastructure-level failure causes my vehicle to come in contact with another, especially if both vehicles are provably-in-autonomous-mode at the time of the accident.

Which isn't to say that owner-pays wouldn't work, but we do want the system provider to have skin in the game, and such a policy could dramatically slow adoption of the technology by anyone who doesn't also want to assume liability for something they probably just massively funded through taxes (for example).

A solvable problem, in any case, and it's great that the tech is getting to the point where details like insurance effects are worth working on.

I do agree that manufacturers have to have skin in the game, but that doesn’t necessarily have to happen through liability (though that’s certainly a possibility). I would imagine that there will, for example, be very tight and thorough certification of any new autonomous car.

This is in any way a very interesting topic to think about and I think that all the legal hurdles are very solvable once the technology is solid.

(By the way, I only added the remark about the German system because it’s the only one I know. I was under the impression that there are similar systems in place elsewhere, I’m just not sure about that.)

So the idea here is that if the car crashes, people find out that an algorithm didn't handle a situation very well, and they sue the manufacturer over negligence regarding product safety.

No, the market doesn't work like that. Auto insurers will raise the price for human-driven car owners.

Rather, they will make the current price the standard for (self-driving cars), and increase the price for (human-driven cars), thereby ensuring more money for themselves.

    if car.self_driving.safe?
      car.human_driven.price_to_insure.raise
    elsif 1==0
      car.any.price_to_insure.lower
    end

How does this opinion square with their lobbying efforts to legalize driverless vehicles (e.g., in Nevada)?

A lot of things have to happen first - and the liability issue is just one of them. The auto insurance markets and laws have to adapt and change, and who knows who will object to this. Consumers have rethink the very meaning of car. Safety needs to be worked out. Someone has to pay for all this. This is decades away at best.

If/when this happens, it's more likely that Google doesn't exist than Google profiting from driverless cars.

Again, as soon as the statistics come in about accidents with driverless systems, I expect a push for mandating that all ordinary vehicles have them, because putting them on every car would likely save almost 30K lives a year in the US alone: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx . Interesting sidenote: why did vehicular deaths decline by 25% between 2007 and 2009, without any real decrease in miles traveled? Odd.

My hypotheses:

Older, less-safe cars are breaking down and getting off the road. Newer cars are better able to handle higher speeds and collision avoidance maneuvers. Safety features previously found only in luxury cars are becoming available in lower-end models.

Many roads were widened and/or improved as part of the economic stimulus. More lanes and wider shoulders means more room to dodge a potential accident.

Maybe the weather has been more mild on particularly dangerous roads.

Everything I've been hearing indicates they are coming sooner than later, and that it's a revolution not many people are that aware of.

2. The auto manufacturers will only tepidly roll this out very with tons of regulatory and legal tiptoeing.

3. The end user will have to sign away any legal rights to recourse and/or the government(s) will have to amend statutory rights accordingly before the first cars hit the road.

4. It will happen, eventually. It will save hundreds of thousands of lives/year.

Of course, as you're riding down the road in your Google-powered driverless car, there will be ads on the dashboard monitor, paid for by the businesses you pass by on your route.

Since the end user will probably not be the plaintiff "The care you made owned by my neighbor ran over my son!" it will have to be a statutory fix IMO.

Question: How do you get "hundreds of thousands of lives per year?" How much safer do you expect these to be and where do you expect them to be driven?

Says who? That's far from a decided matter.