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The Auto Accident Attorney has worked with the details of nearly every type of car model and driver technique — not to mention every shade of accident there is. The team here also continues to keep up with the new technology advances of the day. As Google, Tesla and Apple all struggle to get everything ready sooner rather than later, he’s also here to evaluate what that will mean for his clients. We’ll tell you what you need to know about the safety and risks of driving a car that actually drives itself.
A Revealing Look at the Past
Driverless cars may sound futuristic, and that would imply to many people that they’re entirely new. Actually, the technology that has made much of their possibility a reality has already been in place for a while. When we hear about these cars, people may focus on the negatives but there are two sides to the story. While there are certainly risks to these new forces on the road, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have certain benefits that have already been proven to work.
Advancing Safety
These cars will be built with crash-avoidance features, but again, your current car may have some of these perks too. Forward-collision warning and automatic emergency braking have prevented a variety of would-be bumps, dents and scrapes already, and lane-departure prevention is there to ensure your squeeze into another lane doesn’t get too tight.
Liability
Autonomous cars will be difficult for insurance to figure out. Without more data, insurance will have their hands full when it comes to figuring out how to assess their risks. They’ll need to evaluate the severity of collisions and potential user error and weigh it against how the technology will make the drives safer. They also have to determine who is actually liable in a crash.
Finding Someone to Blame
People might claim that it wasn’t the drivers fault, that it was the technology that was defective in an autonomous crash. This will lead insurers to have to hire or work with people who have advanced skill sets as the years go by. Those who manufacture these cars have already speculated that it will be the autonomous vehicle that is found at fault if the technology is proven to have failed at the time of the crash. This is made more complicated though if the driver has the chance to regain control of the car but failed to do so. These types of final decisions may be decided on a case-by-case basis, which could lead to wildly different outcomes for the same situation.
Litigation During the Transition
There will still be drivers on the road for quite some time, and when autonomous vehicles and regular cars face off against each other on the road, it could make for some pretty dangerous encounters. We don’t yet know exactly what autonomous vehicles will do when given general hand signals, like the wave or even a manual turn signal, making lawsuits more complicated.
Rates and More
The Auto Accident Attorney can tell you that when insurers decide on rates, they’re typically looking at what the driver has done in the past. When they no longer have a driving record to look at, they will most likely begin focusing solely on the car itself and nothing else. It would mean that information about the vehicle you buy would be the only thing that matters, so you will have further incentive to buy from the company that produces the safest car.
What You Can Do
There have already been cases in the news about judges or lawyers not understanding technology enough to successfully try cases, which can be incredibly frustrating for those who were wronged by a technology they trusted. If you or someone you know was involved with any type of failure in the vehicle (e.g., forward-collision warning malfunction), then call the Auto Accident Attorney at GOM Law for a free consultation. Learn more about your rights and the next steps to take for justice.