[lb1lf]

AZ gets dark at night. The workaround is for cars to have headlights.

Not knowing the law as it applies for (semi-)autonomous vehicle testing in Arizona, I am very curious how this one turns out.

Based on my experience driving at night (In Norway, where it also gets pretty dark), even in rural areas with no street lights, you tend to discover pedestrians -even the ones not wearing safety reflectors- significantly more than a second and a half before you cross paths with them.

So - while the vehicle is driving autonomously, there's still a driver (or whatever we should call it, seeing as they do not drive as such) behind the wheel.

If the driver had paid attention to the road, rather than her cell phone, this accident likely wouldn't have happened.

So - who is to blame, legally speaking? The 'driver' for not paying attention? The coder implementing the control algorithms? The HW engineering team deciding which sensors to use? Someone else?

This will be a lot simpler when vehicles are 'properly' autonomous - but right now, it seems AVs simply give the 'driver' all sorts of incentive for not paying attention, while still not absolving them of responsibility. That's the worst of both worlds.

[typeformer]

Uber is a corporation, so it as a legal entity is liable, any kind of individual liability is possible to be litigated but very difficult to win. One problem is that corporate charters once granted are never revoked so corporations just keep doing terrible things and diffusing the costs of their actions onto society with minuscule repercussions. You can bet if I was looking down at my phone and not at the road and then hit a woman in the dark (all captured on camera) I would be going to jail... But, Uber has done some really despicable things (stealing the medical records of a rape victim to use for intimidation), and now they've likely killed someone and no one will ever see cell time.