Compensation at the Crossroads: Autonomous Vehicles and Alternative Victim Compensation Schemes

Abstract

Over the last five years, a small but growing number of vehicle accidents involving fully or partially autonomous vehicles have raised a new and profoundly novel legal issue: who should be liable (if anyone) and how victims should be compensated (if at all) when a vehicle controlled by an algorithm rather than a human driver causes injury. The answer to this question has implications far beyond the resolution of individual autonomous vehicle crash cases. Whether the American legal system is capable of handling these cases fairly and efficiently implicates the likelihood that (a) consumers will adopt autonomous vehicles, and (b) the rate at which they will (or will not) do so. These implications should concern law and policy makers immensely. If autonomous cars stand to drastically reduce the number of fatalities and injuries on U.S. roadways-and virtually every scholar believes that they will-getting the adjudication and compensation aspect of autonomous vehicle injuries "wrong," so to speak, risks stymieing adoption of this technology and leaving more Americans at risk of dying at the hands of human drivers.