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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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self-driving cars are essentially banned.

I don't see why that's a problem, to be honest.

There has to be some sort of consequence for the manufacturer when self-driving cars cause an accident, same as how human drivers pay fines or go to jail. What's your preferred liability structure?

To the owner of the self-driving car would be another option, maybe? This seems like it would better work with cars that have a full self-driving mode, but could also be driven ordinarily.

I'm not convinced that self-driving cars would be banned, instead of just way more expensive. It would depend on how much liability they would tend to have.

I don't know. All I know is the consequences. Once the cars become popular enough, a self-driving car company is basically going to be mostly a legal company, defending (or settling) lawsuits in all 50 states involving its cars. And that's even if its cars are perfect and never cause accidents, especially since the car company is going to look like "deep pockets" to plaintiff's attorneys and juries. The cost of all this legal defense is going to increase the cost of the cars by a ridiculous amount, and the more cars there are the more of a chance of a "reverse lottery" where a self-driving car is involved in an accident that kills a busful of kindergartners and is found liable for more than Alex Jones even was. As long as there's a fairly small number of cars they can play the odds, but a liability regime which involves a car manufacturer in every major accident one of their cars is involved in will kill the whole thing.

An imperfect analogy already exists with commercial vehicles, where the company that owns them and their insurance company is held liable for any damages caused by the driver.

The usual demands are so high as to be called the ‘ghetto lottery’.

You're assuming the car companies are the ones footing the bill. They buy insurance for things like this, and the premiums reflect the risk and the average settlement value. This is how every company manages risk, including the car companies, who already get sued in product liability actions. Unless the risks are so high that they effectively become uninsurable, the cost of the insurance will just be reflected in the price of the vehicle. And if they are uninsurable, then self-driving cars are probably too dangerous to be marketed as such anyway. I would mention that I say this as someone who is skeptical that full self driving will be available in his lifetime.

Insurance helps individual drivers because they can pool their risk with all the other drivers. A self-driving car company selling a sufficient number cars may as well self-insure. And yes, the expected cost of liability would be baked into the cars in either case, but I expect if they got it right, self-driving cars would be prohibitively expensive. If they got it wrong they'd go bankrupt when they big verdict came up.

As a products liability lawyer, I can tell you that insurance coverage is a lot more complicated than that. Any hypothetical policy would base the premiums on the number of vehicles sold. If there's a defect that results in injury, only a small percentage of the affected vehicles are going to result in claims, and only a small percentage of the total claims are going to involve huge losses. Huge verdicts only result when the insurance companies are adamant that there is no liability and are looking to get out from under it. Once it's clear there's liability (and often not even then), they'll settle claims at standard rates. You may get a couple of eye popping verdicts but these won't become a normal thing. No Plaintiff's lawyer is going to spend 100k+ taking a contingency case to trial chasing a verdict that's likely to bankrupt the company and leave him and his client waiting 5 years in the unsecured creditor line in a Chapter 11 hoping they can recover a percentage of the original verdict. Better to take the cash now.

If Ford was fully liable for any accident in which a driver of a Ford vehicle was found at fault, but this did not apply to any other vehicles, how much more do you think Ford vehicles would cost than all those other vehicles to cover that liability? I expect it would be at least an order of magnitude; being involved in an accident with a Ford vehicle would be a potential lottery-winner (regardless of who was at fault, and that's often muddy). And I think that's true even if from some nonexistent objective observer's POV, the Ford driver was never actually at fault.

The part you're forgetting is that if Ford has to insure against all those accidents then the driver doesn't. The up front cost to the consumer may be more, but it's effectively prepaying an insurance policy that lasts the life of the vehicle. Whether or not you're actually coming out ahead depends on specific numbers, but as long as they're somewhere in the ballpark of what you'd spend on insurance then it's a question of how much you value self-driving capability, which is already enough of an advantage that people would be willing to pay a steep premium.

The part you're forgetting is that if Ford has to insure against all those accidents then the driver doesn't. The up front cost to the consumer may be more, but it's effectively prepaying an insurance policy that lasts the life of the vehicle.

Yes, but I claim the per-accident cost for Ford will be more because liability is not limited to policy limits + net worth of driver, and because plaintiff's attorneys and juries will know this. (Not to mention adverse selection of bad drivers into Fords, but that doesn't apply to the self-driving case)

I just spent all day defending large companies in products liability actions, and I'll do the same thing tomorrow, etc. I don't have the time or the inclination right now to give a crash course on how personal injury litigation actually works, but suffice it to say that the jury is irrelevant. We often bring it up but it's more of a theoretical construct than a real thing, because there's no way in hell a case actually goes to trial unless things go significantly off the rails. Damages in a case aren't related in any way to coverage limits or how deep the defendant's pockets are. The damages usually aren't even alleged and when we're evaluating cases are projected awards are just estimates. But no one wants to go to trial; these things settle. Plaintiffs' lawyers, as I said earlier, have to work for free until the case is resolved. The plaintiffs themselves don't want to wait, either, and their engagement agreements require them to accept any reasonable offer. Most of the work involved in a case is less legal razzle-dazzle and more going through the evidence systematically to determine an appropriate amount for settlement negotiations. The idea of a rainmaker gunning for a huge verdict is something more out of a John Grisham novel than the reality of day to day lawyering. There are some Plaintiffs' attorneys who are like that, but they tend to get shitty cases that it quickly becomes apparent aren't even worth trying for a big score; they usually end up just taking whatever we offer them. Some are more aggressive than others, but they're all pragmatic. They have businesses to operate, and they can't afford to throw 200 grand into a holein the hope that it turns into a big score. Any Plaintiff's lawyer working on contingency needs a war chest, and it's much easier and better for their clients to make sure they get a fair settlement then to burn through all their operating capital in search of a huge payday. There's also the added wrinkle that most jurisdictions now have mandatory settlement conferences with the judge; judges in general aren't necessarily averse to trials, but they don't like it when the parties can't settle straightforward cases with no major issues. If one party is intransigent, they aren't getting any help there. As for the insurance companies, they're durable. They survived asbestos, where they're still paying millions of dollars a year on decades-old general liability policies that had low premiums to begin with. They survived countless natural disasters where everyone in a large metro suddenly needs a new car or house at once. They'll survive self-driving cars just fine.

One caveat I'd add is that this is, of course, dependent on self0driving cars being as good as if not better than human drivers are overall. If they're not that good then they'll never be able to market them in such a way that will absolve the driver from any responsibility. Despite recent gains, I'm skeptical that they'll ever get that good in our lifetimes, in which case this exchange is pure navel gazing. But if they do, I don't think liability is going to be a huge issue.

The big downside of self-insuring for a company is probably political. If you've got a policy from Lloyd's any effort to bankrupt you through insurance payout lawfare is going to get a lot of very important people upset on your behalf.
If musk self-insured there's nothing stopping Some Judge In New York from ordering 70 billion dollar payouts every time a Tesla is involved in a fender-bender.

You need to smear the money around for self defense, and pay off enough of the Party that they at least can't unify in looting you.

Yes this is a trivial problem to solve. We already have a massive auto insurance industry. Everything looks like self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers.

You either add it to the costs of the car as essentially pre-bought insurance for the purchaser (which should be cheaper than current policies) or work out some long-term payment plan on the buyer for yearly insurance (with some kind of termination in time after so many years etc).

Yes this is a trivial problem to solve. We already have a massive auto insurance industry. Everything looks like self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers.

The auto insurance industry works because there's a relatively low cap on liability per accident (after which they stop paying out and the driver is on the hook, but the driver is an individual who likely doesn't have much). Once the manufacturer is on the hook, that cap is irrelevant.

Commercial vehicle owners have such a high to nonexistent liability cap that there are entire sections of the insurance industry specializing in suing them, and somehow they manage.

Ok fair enough. Average human low liability but big corporate gets $30 million a life.

Though I guess solutions can be found when it’s necessary.

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