Survey Sunday: When self driving cars crash, who gets the blame? — SkimNews
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- Electrek tallied nearly 3,000 reader votes on liability for AI-driven vehicle failures, timing the survey to coincide with Tesla's Cybercab re-unveiling in Austin and the start of Tesla Semi series production in Nevada.
- Only about 3.5% of respondents (102 votes) blamed the person in the driver's seat, even when that person had summoned the autonomous taxi themselves.
- Nearly 90% of votes landed on the developers of the AI, with commenter Stephen Fields arguing owners had no actionable prevention step when a 'black box' drives the car.
- Commenters Ian and pushedbyvolts countered that the vehicle owner should carry liability, noting cars are insured by owners and every car is already capable of breaking the law with or without a driver.
- Top commenter dieselox proposed a clean test: 'If you take away the AI driving, would the accident have happened?' — and extended it to mode-confusion incidents, holding the AI maker responsible for foreseeable misuse.
- Regular commenter BCGeiger argued for splitting liability evenly between the car manufacturer and the AI manufacturer, framing them as working 'hand-in-hand to bring about this hellscape.'
- The survey backdrop included fatal Tesla accidents making headlines and Waymo accumulating thousands of parking tickets as autonomous taxi volume climbs.
Why it matters: As Tesla's Cybercab re-debuts and the Tesla Semi enters series production while Waymo racks up thousands of parking tickets, nearly 90% of ~3,000 Electrek readers told manufacturers and AI developers — not the human summoning the ride — they should eat the liability when self-driving goes wrong. That near-consensus hands automakers and their software suppliers the bill for every autonomous incident at exactly the moment robotaxis and semis are scaling from prototype to fleet.
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