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Unfortunately, if manufacturers of self-driving cars can be sued for all accidents in which self-driving cars are involved (the "caused" part doesn't come into play until the lawsuit is underway), self-driving cars are essentially banned. The cost of covering that liability is staggering.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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