Aurora Innovation, an autonomous driving company based in Pittsburgh, hopes to put tens of thousands of driverless semi-trucks on the road by the end of the decade. As of last year, they’ve got at least 20 making deliveries from terminals at UPS, FedEx, Uber Freight, Werner, and other shipping firms. The trucks are being kept in Texas for now, where ice on the roads isn’t a typical problem.
But are we ready for 80,000-pound machines traveling at 65 mph with no drivers behind the wheel?
NBC Philadelphia reported that the first widely used autonomous driving machines will likely be semi-trucks precisely due to lack of consumer trust in autonomous driving. Waymo in California is facing legal obstacles to expanding; General Motors’ robotaxi got into a serious crash that hurt its chances of wide adoption. A survey from AAA showed that 66% of Americans wouldn’t get in a driverless vehicle.
Aurora and other autonomous trucking companies say that their trucks are actually safer than human drivers (although all ‘driverless’ trucks in operation have human safety drivers). Each truck’s sensors can ‘see’ farther than eyes are capable of, the autonomous system never gets tired, and it’s impossible for a driverless truck to drive under the influence of substances.
At the same time, computers make errors all the time—in many cases, errors that a human driver would never make.
Will Autonomous Driving Companies Be Held Accountable?
An IBM presentation from 1979 once said, “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”
If a driverless truck can’t be held accountable, then who will take responsibility for its decisions? Who will be held liable for the accidents and injuries caused by a driverless truck? It has to be the owner of the machine, the same as it would be if a defective device caused someone harm.
We’re witnessing the driverless trucking industry’s first steps, which means all the legal questions haven’t been asked or answered yet. But our firm has been around since 1922—we’ve seen a lot of industries come and go. When the time comes, Handler, Henning & Rosenberg LLC will be there to advocate for injured motorists, pedestrians, and employees to recover everything they’ve lost from the owners and manufacturers of driverless vehicles of all kinds.