"“Companies can get away with a lot that’s in a legal gray area, as long as bad things don’t happen,” says Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society, who studies self-driving vehicles. But when bad things do happen, regulators step in—and those gray areas tend to shrink pretty quickly.
This is why, Smith says, other risk-averse automakers developing autonomous technology have been so slow to introduce it. Questions of liability are unresolved. If a self-driving system causes a tragedy—especially one involving an innocent bystander—public pushback is likely. The strongest argument for the technology, that it will make driving safer, would be badly weakened."
- Date Published:10/22/2015
- Original Publication:Wired