Navigating The Moral Maze Of Driverless Vehicles: Safety, Risks And Regulation

Driverless vehicles continue to raise difficult legal and moral questions around safety. What are the regulatory implications for this fast-paced industry?

Autonomous vehicles (AV) that require no input from human occupants are currently being tested on public roads. Experimental prototypes, still closely supervised by people, are already mixing with ordinary traffic in parts of the US, Canada, UK, Sweden, Germany and Japan.

Technology giant Google alone has clocked up more than 2.2 million miles of autonomous testing1 since it began developing its technology in 2009. It has now launched a new company, Waymo, to commercialise the technology. Other participants - including manufacturers like Volvo, parts suppliers such as Bosch and service providers like Uber - are pursuing their own ambitious development projects.

The arrival of autonomous vehicles as either purchasable products or hireable services now seems inevitable. However, in addition to the obvious technological challenges, driverless vehicles also raise a host of legal and moral questions. Our roads, our laws and our expectations have all been shaped by more than a century of vehicles controlled by human beings, with all their foibles and failings. Adding robotic cars, buses and trucks to the mix is not going to be trivial.

"There are certain areas of the law that are well equipped to deal with new technology, such as the patent system," notes Daniel Cole, an intellectual property partner at Gowling WLG. "But the archaic language of traffic laws that talk about a vehicle being under a person's control - that's all going to have to be completely revamped. And if you've ever watched anything move through a legislature, you'll know that's not happening in a month. That's years and years of work."

Setting the legal framework

Legal questions run from relatively minor issues, such as who pays for speeding fines, to deep moral questions about putting one life ahead of another in an accident.

One potentially tricky area is how to deal with rules that sometimes need to be broken. "Imagine an AV sitting at a red traffic light while an ambulance is trying to get through, refusing to move because it's been told it can't run through a red light. Meanwhile a patient is dying," says Cole. "There has to be a way to say it's OK to have that technical violation in these circumstances. But that's tricky because there are endless possibilities."

Liability when things go wrong is another area that is...