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Open the car door HAL: The technology to have cars drive themselves is within reach, as...
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Thursday, June 14, 2012, 12:06 PM ETOpen the car door HAL: The technology to have cars drive themselves is within reach, as automakers grapple with how far to take the loss of driver control. Computing power and sensor technology has advanced past the point of just providing alerts or parking cars, with Google already testing self-driving cars on real roads. A question for interested firms such as GM, F, BAMXY.PK, TM, and VLKAY.PK is how to avoid huge liability with insurance responsibility presumably passing on from drivers to manufacturers.
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In any case, if you are an investor and not just a whiner and complainer, then you should be very happy if Ford (and other automakers) is able to cash in on premium pricing and higher margins on advanced features, which might be mandated in the not-too-distant future.
Their Volt didn't exactly send their stock thru the roof.
GM would have to go to 54 dollars, or there abouts, in order for Government Motors to break even. It reloaded at 32.
Now it's just north of twenty.
This is a great question. The normal chain would be the owner of a vehicle is liable either because he was behind the wheel of his own car and was negligent in an accident or because of the imputed negligence flowing from his negligent permissive user. The permissive user (driver) is also liable. Rarely is the manufacturer liable although we had those joke cases in Minnesota and California involving alleged brake failure on Toyotas.
With the HAL 9000 car, the owner of the vehicle would still be liable, but now the manufacturer would be exposed for large damages for unforeseen circumstances which will happen a thousand times a day.
A cap on the manufacturer's responsibility?
1. A robot-car may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot-car must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot-car must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Of course the Three Laws start from the assumption that there can be no conflicts between humans (eg: no "Road Rage") ... and having such conflicts will give rise to terrifying consequences, as the robot-vehicles revolt against their imperfect humans and decide to solve the problem in their own logical unblinking way. Ah well.
Another immediate market would be teenage drivers, where in this case some sort of assisted driver technology car could be constrained to within some performance envelope.
The last immediate market would be medical special conditions such as epilepsy. All of the above could be incentivized by the ability to obtain insurance at a reasonable cost.
My car drives itself 50% of the time anyway, so what's the big deal.