Volvo to 'accept full liability' for crashes with its driverless cars

Re: @Flocke Kroes Not theat simple

Not hitting other vehicles is probably one of the least hard problems for autonomous vehicles.

Because cars are simple machines that never suffer mechanical failure, and there are no external failure modes (road surface failures, objects suddenly intruding into the path of the vehicle) that could ever cause two autonomous vehicles to crash.

Why is it that even the autonomous-vehicle objectionists so often ignore the full range of failure modes? Technology solves problems right up to the point where it doesn't. AVs might greatly reduce the number of collisions, but they can't prevent them.

If they ever do then, again, log files.

Because there are no failure modes that wouldn't leave log files intact. Again, this won't cover all cases, so we still have to decide how to deal with the remaining ones.

Re: Not theat simple

Also it won't cover you for bad maintenance, probably not even a blown tire etc. It will only accepts blame for the car 'driving wrong'.

Other "driverless" car companies such as Mercedes and Google have previously stated the same thing.

@ Graham Marsden Re: Not theat simple

> hopefully there's no hard-coded passwords or other such nonsense caused by Sales taking precedence over Security!

Chances of these systems coming to market without exploitable security holes? They will exist and they will be found. Given that current connected vehicle systems don't seem to isolate the canbus from the infotainment systems, which are in turn connected to the mobile network, I can't see the bean counters allowing anywhere near enough money to be spent on R&D in this area - it'll be a case of 'we've gotta be first to market/we've gotta get to market asap now that our competitors are there, get it working and start selling 'em NOW'

Re: Not theat simple

I foresee a need of many 'log file analysts'!

Re: the fact that the brake lights have come on on the car in front

And will even cope when brake lights have been rigged

Re: What ifs

EVERY article ever written on El Reg about driverless cars, someone in the forum pops up with "who's going to pay for it if/when they crash"

I do. And now we have a car company saying quite unambiguously that they accept the blame for faults in their car design or manufacture, and that is a great step forward (subject to getting country laws to accepts such a thing).

As other commentards have pointed out, an autonomous car will almost certainly out-brake a human driver in any obvious impact scenario. Though how well they will deal with odd cases, loss of communications (doh! stupid idea...) and anticipation of kids, etc, playing at the roadside is another more difficult question to be answered.

Finally, can we please have proper audits and standards for car software? It is shitty enough we have cars recalled due to potential hacking via in-car entertainment (e.g. Jeep) and not shutting off (e.g. Ford) but having full control of all aspects of the vehicle offers far more opportunities for a BSOD than so far (e.g. Toyota's "unintended acceleration").

Re: What ifs

@James Micallef

"Kudos to Volvo for putting their money where their mouth is, hopefully Google etc will follow suit"

Google and Mercedes have previously also warranted that they will accept liability, they just didn't make such a big deal about it.

Re: What ifs

> someone in the forum pops up with "who's going to pay for it if/when they crash"

A slightly different take...

Who is going to jail if something goes wrong?

It's one thing to pony up for an insurance payout for property damage. A bunch of actuaries will do some impressive work in Excel and tell Volvo to set aside a few hundred quid for each car sold.

Re: What ifs

"This means that it should be incredibly cheap for a private person to insure a driverless Volvo, and thus removes the biggest obstacle to takeup*"

It gets better. In the longer term, it will become increasingly expensive to get insurance to drive a car yourself.

Road accidents current kill a thousand or more people every year in the UK. The legal cost of accidentally killing someone is relatively low, because society accepts the argument that "everyone needs a car". Once it becomes clear that everyone can have a car at a much reduced risk of killing other people, those who insist on doing it manually will face stiffer penalties for their mistakes because courts will argue that they are negligent in not using the driverless option.

Re: how do you steal a car that will drive itself back home?

Probably break it for spares, though I can see some great Darwin awards coming for petty thiefs...

Re: Questions that bugs me....

Yeah, this is where I see this falling over badly - Human drivers are bad at this as it is.

Case in point: On Sunday Oxford City Council, in its infinite wisdom, closed one of the major arterial roads into the city so that there could be a half marathon run along it. They diverted the traffic onto a small residential side street that runs parallel to this road. This street, also in their infinite wisdom, they filled with single-lane constriction points every 150 yards or so in order to "Slow traffic" a few years back. As it's residential, people are also permitted to park on it for most of its length.

Here's the street in question

Imagine what happens when a queue of traffic going in one direction hits a queue of traffic trying to go in the other direction on a road like that. All it takes is for one person to pull out into that little constriction without there being room for them to leave it again on the other side and the whole thing locks solid.

I was stuck in this for two hours, and had to get out of my car several times and go direct traffic - and I was by no means the only one doing that - because people kept trying to move into spaces that were gone by the time they got there.* The only way out was for chains of people - sometimes 10 cars long - to back up.

Now, in a perfect world with only driverless cars then this presumably would be preventable because they could all negotiate with one another and you wouldn't get that one dick head in an XC90 that decided everything was taking too long and repeatedly tried to force his stupid oversized piece of crap into places where anyone with eyesight could tell it wasn't going to fit and nearly taking people's mirrors off!**

The answer "That problem will go away once driverless cars are in the majority" or "Driverless cars will use telemetry from other cars" isn't good enough. It's like the bit where you open the box with the number 4 wrench (included in the box!) Until there is some critical mass of the things out there feeding one another data it just won't work.

Don't think I'm against the technology, but this is a hard problem, and there's a lot of handwaving when it's raised. Until someone has a very clear plan about how to get from where we are now to where we want to be, it's going to be hard to sell the things.

*And if the people organizing this wonderful public disruption had any brains they'd have seen this coming and sent some traffic police down there to do this professionally, but predictably, they didn't.

**Sorry, that's a rant, but that one guy was probably responsible for 45 wasted minutes on what should have been a 10 minute drive home

Re: Crash for cash

The crime problem for driverless cars isn't insurance fraudsters, it's when thugs learn to spot them and know with a large amount of confidence they can block the road and the car WILL stop (whereas a meatbag-controlled missile seeing a masked figure in the road might just put the foot down.)

I doubt it'd be a big problem, but I can guarantee someone will try it and the car manufacturers will have to consider it when building cars (possibly automatically locking the doors under certain conditions or somesuch.)