Ticketing Autonomous Vehicles

The likelihood that you’ll encounter autonomous vehicles on public roads will increase this year. That’s due in part to the technical success Google has had with its autonomous cars and in part due to the efforts of legislators to define the rules of the road for the new vehicles.

Google has logged more than 300,000 miles with its autonomous vehicles. That technical feat has been accompanied by legislatures in Nevada, Florida, and, last fall, California, allowing the vehicles to operate on public roads.

The need for legislation and the legal status of autonomous vehicles in states that have not acted are unclear. Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggested legislation is not required. CNN reported that when Brin was asked who would be ticketed if a driverless car runs a red light, he replied, “Self-driving cars do not run red lights.”

However, Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, summed up the ambiguity surrounding the status of autonomous vehicles in the title of a paper published Nov. 1: “Automated Vehicles Are Probably Legal in the United States.” He took as his starting point “common law’s presumption of legality.” (Visit my blog at bit.ly/N8rmKm for links to referenced source material in this editorial.)

Smith noted that three legal regimes might be implicated in the question of autonomous-vehicle status: the 1949 Geneva Convention on Road Traffic, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations, and relevant state codes. He described the difficulties of determining the applicability of such codes. For example, California expressly states that a bicycle is not a vehicle, yet a bicyclist may be convicted of violating vehicle speed-limit laws.

The picture becomes even murkier with the 1949 Geneva Convention, one of the goals of which is to promote uniform rules to help drivers from one country operate safely in another. It addresses vehicles, convoys, and even draught, pack, and saddle animals and notes that drivers must at all times be able to control their vehicles or animals. Smith concluded that the requirement for driver control refers to animals, perhaps with carts in tow. As Smith wrote, “In 1949…deliberately requiring a motor vehicle to have a driver would have seemed as important as deliberately requiring that vehicle to maintain contact with the ground.”

Smith concluded as well that federal standards do not prohibit automated driving. Federal rules, he wrote, assume but do not require the presence of a driver, and they do not prohibit drive-by-wire systems.

Smith then surveyed state codes and concluded that no state expressly requires a vehicle to have a driver, although various codes do impose obligations on a vehicle’s driver, operator, or owner.

Because of the ambiguity in applying motor-vehicle codes written before autonomous vehicles were envisioned, Smith suggested that states may wish to clarify their laws regarding autonomous vehicles, and he proposed draft language that would address some of the issues he raised in his paper. He distinguished between an automated vehicle’s ordinary and virtual driver. “The natural person occupying or otherwise using an automated vehicle is subject to existing rules of the road unless the manufacturer or insurer of the vehicle has assumed these responsibilities by registering as a virtual driver,” he concluded.

Legislative clarification can be helpful. Human “drivers” already have ceded control of their vehicles’ braking and other systems to computers. Like it or not, the vehicles you encounter on public thoroughfares will be increasingly operating on their own whether or not a human sits behind the steering wheel.