> According to the Texas Transportation Code, the owner of a driverless car is “considered the operator” and can be cited for breaking traffic laws “regardless of whether the person is physically present in the vehicle.”
This is all well and good when the owner is Waymo or Cruise and actually has direct control over the code that caused the vehicle to fail, but for consumer cars it brings up important questions of what "ownership" even means these days.
Let's say I own a self-driving car that's able to reliably park itself. I pay close attention the first few months to make sure that it's safe and reliable, and once it's proved itself I start trusting it. I've been as careful as can reasonably be expected, but one day the manufacturer pushes a mandatory, automatic over-the-air update that contains a critical bug, and my car suddenly starts misbehaving and I get ticketed.
This isn't an unlikely scenario—how many of us have "owned" a product that has suddenly changed its behavior in undesirable ways after we purchased it? It doesn't seem reasonable to me to hold an individual consumer liable for bugs in a machine that they are unable to fully control.
Either manufacturers need to be required to provide important software freedoms to vehicle owners, or the manufacturers themselves need to be liable for infractions.
This is all well and good when the owner is Waymo or Cruise and actually has direct control over the code that caused the vehicle to fail, but for consumer cars it brings up important questions of what "ownership" even means these days.
Let's say I own a self-driving car that's able to reliably park itself. I pay close attention the first few months to make sure that it's safe and reliable, and once it's proved itself I start trusting it. I've been as careful as can reasonably be expected, but one day the manufacturer pushes a mandatory, automatic over-the-air update that contains a critical bug, and my car suddenly starts misbehaving and I get ticketed.
This isn't an unlikely scenario—how many of us have "owned" a product that has suddenly changed its behavior in undesirable ways after we purchased it? It doesn't seem reasonable to me to hold an individual consumer liable for bugs in a machine that they are unable to fully control.
Either manufacturers need to be required to provide important software freedoms to vehicle owners, or the manufacturers themselves need to be liable for infractions.