Driverless cars: Who’s responsible for an accident?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about driverless cars and their safety, and the question is, “Are they really safe?” There are two sides to this question or there’s both sides of the answer, which is, the driverless cars have a tendency to prevent some human error. But at the same time, the computer glitches in the system can also cause crashes, so both sides are correct on that.
In fact, recently, Tesla had on its YouTube page actually put up a situation where there was a test drive of the car. This particular car actually avoided a car accident that was already in existence because it could sense it. In that case, it avoided the accident but there have been numerous instances where there’ve been technological glitches in these so-called safe self-driving cars. What has happened, Google used to put up on its webpage a statistic each month as far as the number of accidents, as far as the driverless car– the self-driving cars. They’ve now since taken that off and it’s more or less than they really don’t want the public to know the dangers of the driverless cars because there’s actually been a few deaths with regard to the driverless cars. Currently, there’s not a lot of regulations governing the safety and so forth of the driverless cars. So the manufacturers seem to be in a rush before all these regulations get put into place as to getting them on the road and so forth.
As I was referring to a little bit earlier, Google used to report statistics on the number of the accidents with its driverless cars. They quit doing so. They do — some states do require this information to be reported to the Department of Motor Vehicle Safety. But then once it gets on the website for the Department of Motor Vehicle Safety, as far as whether there was a death or whatever the case was, what type of injury it was involving a self-driving car, that information doesn’t get out there to the public very quickly. In fact, there are not many news organizations that are reporting on either of these deaths or serious injuries from people who have been in self-driving cars.
Interestingly, these self-driving cars, the manufacturers are still saying that you cannot go hands-free but yet that’s what people think they can do. They think that they can go hands-free and they can engage in other activities. The millennial generation, which I think is the age group of 19 to 24, has a tendency to get into the self-driving cars and reading the newspaper, texting and so forth, all distracting behaviors, assuming that the technology is 100% full proof and it’s not there yet.
If you want my two cents worth of these self-driving cars, I wouldn’t advise right now at this point. There’s not enough data out there. Furthermore, actually, the government is thinking of maybe at some point providing a self-driving car to every person. It sounds great, but it’s just like any other government program, they’re going to go ahead and give you a car, they’re going to restrict the times that you can use it, and it’s going to be another form of governmental control. If you’re big on more governmental control and thinking the government knows what’s best for you, that’s one factor.
As far as the actual safety of the car itself, I don’t think the technology is there. If you ever are involved in a car accident give me a call on 770-792-1000.