> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.

Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...

The standard for human drivers is through the floor.

If we consider fairness/retribution/justice then we won't get this future of less road deaths.

1. There will always be a probability of death from a vehicle. This can never go to 0%.

2. If the probability of a AV causing death is many magnitudes lower than human driving then that is the future we must choose.

If 1 and 2 holds and we hold AV manufactures accountable in the sense that Executives go to jail or are personal liable financially for deaths/injuries then AV will never get released or become mainstream even if this results in less total deaths. The sense of fairness/justice/retribution may make us feel better but result in more overall deaths. Logically this means that there must be a standard. Something like x deaths per y cars manufactured. If above the threshold you get big fines as a company. As technology gets better you can lower the threshold. Anything apart from causing deaths either purposefully or negligently would have be ignored.

Can we as a species accept this? That is another question.

In the US, 11 deaths per billion miles driven (or about 47k per year) is currently seen as an OK cost.

More than twice as much per mile as places like Sweden and Switzerland, and still substantially more than places like Canada, Australia or Germany (all three in the 6-8 deaths per billion miles range). So it's not like there isn't room to improve. The effort to do so just isn't seen as worth the cost at the societal or government level

Turning that into a monetary cost would change the ethics slightly, but it wouldn't be a monumental shift

> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.

If only! "10 Days In Jail For Drunken Driver Who Killed Cyclist Bobby Cann" https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20170126/old-town/ryne-san-h...

We subsidize driving by somewhat over a trillion dollars annually, mostly due to lax penalties for negligence which shift liability to drivers’ victims[1]. One way to tackle all of these problems would be requiring drivers to cover the full damages.

Another simple and effective measure would be changing fines from absolute values to a percentage of income. Right now, parking in a bike lane usually doesn’t kill anyone so drivers are only thinking there’s a small chance of a small fine, but if it was a chance of, say, 0.1% of annual income Waymo technology would magically be capable of not doing that. Add a right of private action and enforcement would be high enough to really speed things along, too, and that’d improve safety and travel times for all road users.

1. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...

> What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?

If AVs will save lives, we need to be sure we aren't punitive to the point of making them disappear.

> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV?

They get their licenses pulled statewide [1]. Cruise's single negligent manslaughter event carried more consequence than dozens of human cases combined.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/dmv-statement-o...

> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.

I wish this were true. Often they get off with a light punishment, or no punishment at all.

> What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?

It’s the same cost/benefit we accept under current rules. Why have cars that can go 3x the speed limit? Why not require breathalyzers in cars before starting them? Why not fine logistics companies if one of their drivers breaks the law? And so on… Because it’s worth it

We can look to other forms of automation to get a sense of what to do. For example, planes largely fly themselves and a loss of life due to manufacturing errors from the manufacturer would deem them liable for those deaths. Seems like the solution here is large penalties and generally broad disincentives for incurring harm.

Adjust the fines such that X is some acceptably large number.

The trickiest part will be figuring out how many dollars per mile driven is an acceptable cost of business..

I'd probably reserve the whole executives to jail thing to cases where you can prove negligence or something.

Full liability. It's a machine with predictable performance.

The law applied to humans needs to account for their fallibilities. Not so with a machine.

Societies can already reduce road deaths to nearly zero, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's fun. It's just redirecting all of the cash we spend on vehicles/cars/highways/roadways/signs/etc into public infrastructure that is all encompassing.

A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not to mention the amount we spend on gasoline, car maintenance, etc etc.

The reason I say it's fun, is because I love being on a train. First time I was able to ride one, which due to living in the good old USA wasn't until I was 23, I yelled "I'm on a train" . The Germans traveling with me weren't as into it.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS#

The CEO gets charged with manslaughter? I work in healthtech and the responsible individual is certainly personally liable for any harm that results from reckless behavior, it should be the same here.

Same as if someone were driving, if a person just jumps in front of your car while you're driving under the limit/sober/etc, you aren't at fault, so the AV should also not be at fault if it couldn't reasonably avoid the harm. You balance these things, benefit to society vs harm to society, and you come to an acceptable tradeoff.

People are killed by industrial equipment fairly regularly.

I'd say we actually have a perfectly functional legal framework for all of this, and the real issue is a lot of new people are about to find out it also applies to them as well.

Whether it was working well in the first place is the real question.

Now try applying this logic to elevators.

Many things already reduce road deaths and they are infinitely easier to do that driverless cars, namely: viable alternatives to driving! Trains, streetcars, bike lanes, whatever.

Want to reduce road deaths? Invest in public transportation.

The legal entity driving the AV should of course be responsible in the same way as human drivers are.

My understanding is that that is already the legal situation?

> The last hurdle is regulatory

How’d you arrive at this conclusion? Why would fleet providers accept regrettable losses? Wouldn’t the last hurdle be technical?

> The question is how to achieve fairness

What does that have to do with automotive safety?

I think jail time for executives should be table stakes. Another thing would be fines well in excess of $10 million. The fines should be defined as percentages of gross revenue, or maybe even (to target VC-funded operations that operate at a loss) percentages of gross expenses. The penalties should be such that a few crashes can put the company entirely out of business.

Holding executives responsible for actual violence is considered promoting violence on this site and is not allowed. Cue the handwringing and moralizing from the usual suspects.

> hoping AV will reduce road deaths in the future.

It won't. The majority of fatalities are caused by drugs and alcohol.

> The last hurdle is regulatory.

Indeed. Compare the USAs DUI laws with any other first world country.

Then it’s an okay cost of doing business. $10 million is a lot of money and consequences for these companies are not purely legal they are also social consequences.

Don't they have 360 video of everything? Maybe they're low priority issues for now but surely those issues cannot be "invisible" because they "aren't legible to statistics."

Completely agree. How is it possible they issued these permits (years ago it seems) without having this infrastructure in place?

In all of your situations except for cases where no good legal option exists, ticketing is just the easier way to apply your suggested idea. It gives a direct incentive to the company to lower the rate as far as is possible. It doesn't allow some minimal amount without a fee, but that doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

The biggest reason for the difference between Autonomous vehicles and peanut butter is that with autonomous vehicles, we already have a compliance system in place....cops. It's not designed for autonomous vehicles, and you are correct that it's not the way you would design it for the ground up for autonomous vehicles, but it's far better to accept the imperfections than to build some new, separate compliance and monitoring system on top of the existing one. The benefits aren't large enough to justify it.

In the far future when the vast majority of vehicles are autonomous? Sure, probably worth scrapping to a new system (by then, my guess is that issues are rare enough to just not have a system at all and just use the legal system in the rare cases of large issues).

Until then, ticketing in the case of traffic violations seems fine and good enough to me.

You make some good points, but here are some counterpoints:

There is an existing infrastructure for ticketing by license plate, payment processing, collection, etc.

You’re describing changes to the law, which require a bunch of procedural hurdles. It’s much easier for the DMV to just promulgate new rules that tap into existing infrastructure, as they did here.

Also, how is the government supposed to assess whether these violations are intentional or not? Tickets are strict liability (you get the ticket if you do it regardless of intent, reasons, etc.) because it is easy to administer.

No, I think ticketing is the right thing to do. You set a law. Any instance of breaking that law costs money, so the AV company has an incentive to reduce the number of violations. The won't be able to bring the number of violations down to 0 just like we can't bring the number of cockroaches in chocolate down to 0, but that nonzero amount is just a regulatory cost they can decrease by getting closer to the goal of 0 violations.

Obviously, we should also have the option to pull vehicles that are brazenly ignoring the law and just eating the cost of the tickets. Just like we do with drivers who do that. But that should be the second line of defense if regular monetary fines (tickets) fail

Seems to me like ticketing is a really simple proxy for everything you’ve just described.

Why pass a thousand new laws when the existing laws have an enforcement mechanism?

Ticketing AVs for individual violations like human drivers is the only fair way.

How would your proposal work for personal driverless cars, with/without custom modifications? ie. if my personal car commits violation on its way to pick me up

Yes, I thought AV by design should not voilate traffic laws.

Ok, but why are AVs getting a break on the same tickets a human gets no "low frequency threshold" for them to be allowed.

If a AV runs a red light or a stop sign, it should be the same penalty, period.

If AV companies want to avoid the tickets, they can make their claimed superior drivers avoid violating the law.

They want to make money from the tickets

I think part of ticketing is the state makes money off of it. If they just shut these companies down no one benefits.

Traffic has rules, you violate them you get a ticket

>If the violations are intentional and easily fixable, then just pass laws/regulations requiring AV's to follow the law or else cease operations entirely.

I have to stop reading the rest of the comment right there.

If the violations are intentional and easily fixable is an incredibly loaded presumption to start any type of conversation, dialogue, or debate. To the point, asking the question 'how do we qualify intention? How are we measuring difficulty of fix? Costs of payroll, computer, deployment, and potential regression testing? What about the very nature of the context that led up to it? Did an external 3rd party cutoff a robotaxi and require that the robotaxi veer into the oncoming traffic lane, bc sensors indicated it was the best decision to avoid a collision, prioritizing safety and human life over traffic law?

What happens when following traffic law statistically leads to a greater risk of loss of life over violating the law?

I must insist we move the dialogue upstream to reality as-is, and there is plenty to discuss there.

I will in good faith issue a starting point: how should we measure the robotaxi driver license wrt suspension? Do we issue a point system that is averaged across the fleet, e.g. violations/car before suspending all operations until licensure evaluation? Personally I think that is a fair starting point amd am completely open minded to alternative views.

Tolls, revenue taxes, ever stricter rules that cause tickets despite technology getting better.

I imagine the city funding issue could be solved with some sort of tax to operate within the city, where a couple cents from each mile driven would be paid to the city. Alternatively, a higher cost for registration at the state level.

What I worry more about is a future where private car ownership seems impractical when there is a large fleet of autonomous Ubers out there to handle the day-to-days, which start out cheap. Once society reaches a point of dependence, will there be enough competition to keep the price down, or will we see consumers of the services get squeezed as companies ratchet up prices to increase margins.

Police departments have already moved on from traffic enforcement to civil forfeiture. Like, a decade ago.

Fix the issue quickly, or optimize to the point where revenue gained from breaking the law exceeds the fine. Last I read they were holding steady on "passengers want us to pull into bikelanes to drop-off" in California.

Probably higher city/state taxes. A police officer making over $200k a year with a pension isn’t making most of their salary from traffic tickets.

I guess it's like patenents (when it's the same thing but comouter) or piracy (but it's model training at a FAANG), where tech just gets a free pass.

It's all pretty nuanced. I don't know where to draw a line.

For instance: Busy intersections with 4-way stop signs are an interesting example of how laws don't quite fit.

It's obviously important to get the order right since nobody wants to be in a car crash today. But the law (often -- we've got 50 states worth of driving laws and they aren't all the same) says something very specific and simplistic about the order: First-come, first-served; if order is unclear, yield to the right. Always wait for the intersection to be completely clear before proceeding.

That sounds nice and neat and it looks good on paper. It was surely at least a very easy system to describe and then write down.

But reality is very different: 4 way stops are an elaborate dance of drivers executing moves simultaneously and without conflict. For instance: Two opposite, straight-going cars can proceed concurrently works fine. All 4 directions can turn right, concurrently. Opposing left turns at the same time? Sure! While others are also turning right? Why not.

When there's room for a move and it creates no conflict, then that move works fine.

We all were taught how these intersections are supposed to work, but then reality ultimately shows us how they do work. And the dance works. It's efficient. Nobody gets ticketed for safely dancing that dance. (And broadly-speaking, a timid law-abiding driver who doesn't know the dance will be let through...eventually.)

The main problem with the dance is that it's difficult to adequately describe and write down and thus codify in law.

But maybe we should try, anyway.

I read an article a while back that they made Waymo more aggressive, in the ways you mention, because they were quite annoying to other drivers when following the letter of the law. There is something to be said for following the flow of traffic.

I would imagine they would be able to revert back to more strict rule following once autonomous vehicles reach some level of critical mass and human drivers are needing to adapt to the AV traffic, rather than AVs needing to adapt to human traffic.

I wonder what happens legally if a biker plows into the Waymo, Casey Neistat style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ

In SF it's legal for taxies to do pickups/drop-offs in bike lanes

I haven't seen any evidence Waymo does it anywhere illegal "just because rideshares do"

Yes, and there's an example towards the end of the article.

> As a Waymo (and other driverless car) supporter, this seems like an obviously good thing, right? I’m a little surprised this wasn’t possible before given the amount of regulatory scrutiny (correctly) applied to these companies

Not necessarily. I went into a bit more detail in my own comment but it might be useful to think that when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, what the effect of those regulations on a person maintaining their own vehicles might be.

Consider that your Waymo got ticketed, but you had flashed it with a "no customer telemetry" firmware. Once Waymo gets the ticket, they flag your car as having "unauthorized" software and now the ball's in your court that the reason why your Waymo got ticketed has nothing to do with the telemetry feature that tells Waymo what radio stations you were listening to.

Also, when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, the ticket isn't going to cost $500.

Yes.

You send robocop.

That can make sense (opinions differ) for individuals, but it's not like the company is advertising with "we get you there at 1.2x legal speed". They're not competing on that; they're not choosing to do this on purpose like an individual might choose to speed (for example because of economic incentives if their hourly price is high)

If they were, then it makes sense to fine them to some multiple of the benefit they got from this advertising tactic, but as it is, I don't see why it should be different from anyone else's ticket. The company isn't likely to enjoy a flood of this administrative work, besides the cost of the actual fines, so they'll work to minimise them anyway

Assuming you divide it down to the earnings per car, that makes perfect sense. Of course right now they aren't making any profit at all, and by the time it is relevant it is likely that the cars will commit substantially no violations at all.

I think this could be a good compromise. Could have a floor value but the ceiling can vary accordingly.

Isn't Norway only for drunk driving? Finland has it for massive speed excesses, but it is based on net taxable income taking out business expenses for taxi drivers, and Waymo is still negative.

If they become profitable you'd want to normalize by number of miles, unless you just want an incentive system to get more people on the road (extra drivers) and increase chance of humans suffering road injuries to boost employment in an internal service sector.

But even then coming out with a more efficient fleet than a competitor for higher margin would be penalized. You'd rather disincentivize skimping on safety for margin and not disincentivize better maintenance and fuel economy.

Agreed. We need to look at reforming fines in general.

Fines should be scaled to income and the value of the vehicle and should exponentially increase for reoffense when in the same catagory of offense.

A more pragmatic metric would be comparing deaths/mile for drivered cars against deaths/mile of driverless cars.

Not sure I agree. The clear boundary here to me is who owns and is operating the vehicle. Waymo both owns and operates their vehicles, it’s a taxi service, you wouldn’t say a Waymo rider is operating a vehicle and therefore deserves the ticket. Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does.

When that happens someday, then the ticket would go to the owner/operator of the vehicle - whoever bought the car. If you get a ticket due to something dumb your personally owned Waymo did, wouldn’t you pursue that case against Waymo separately, the same way you’d pursue Hyundai for selling you a car whose engine blew up after 50k miles?

It seems pretty reasonable to me that when you're not driving, the car is basically a taxi and the taxi service is to blame for any mistakes. The car manufacturer isn't just making cars anymore. It's providing a service.

Perhaps they could sell the car to a different taxi service, though?