[ultrarunner]

It seems carmakers have situated themselves fairly comfortably regarding liability. If a car hits someone in "the road" the victim immediately becomes a "jay walker" and it's their fault. Otherwise the driver made a mistake. Otherwise the DOT is at fault. It's nearly impossible to blame automakers for the damage their products do.

A good example of this might be the lack of intuitive feedback regarding headlights. More and more, dash lights stay on despite exterior lights being off, giving the driver the impression that everything is normal. IIRC several countries including Canada are moving to require exterior lights to be on at all times now, but it boggles my mind that such a simple to understand phenomenon with so many straightforward solutions has to be solved through regulation instead of the automakers just, you know… doing better.

Still, despite a clear design defect and recognition by regulator agencies, no litigation is likely to occur.

[Eisenstein]

It's great that you mention jay walkers because this wasn't a thing before cars. When cars first started appearing on the road there was a huge backlash because kids played in the street and people cross the street and they got hit by cars and people got pissed off. Car clubs started popularizing the term 'jay walker' and shaming people for it in order to reduce the backlash against cars and drivers for hitting people that were using the street. After a while it became normalized that people in the street are at fault and drivers are not.

[Zak]

> Still, despite a clear design defect and recognition by regulator agencies, no litigation is likely to occur.

I'm inclined to think it shouldn't. Cars are highly regulated. There are a great many very specific standards cars have to meet to be legal to sell for road use in most countries. There's stuff we all know about like crash testing for occupants, and more recently for pedestrians, but there's also weird stuff like cars not being allowed to have required lighting on movable bodywork in the US market[0].

I'd set a much higher bar for defective product claims when the design of the product is already subject to a great deal of specific regulation. Courts do not have expertise in car design and are probably worse at specifying design standards for cars than regulatory agencies staffed with experts and dedicated to that task. As you mention, there's a regulatory solution to the problem you're describing already in use in some countries.

[0] Exceptions to that one are occasionally granted on a case by case basis