Most drivers avoid the most serious penalties, and more importantly most victims are denied restitution, not because of sympathetic juries but because of insolvency.
The chance someone will cause a grave accident and the chance someone is insolvent are not independent variables.
You get some real horror stories in law school about people trapped in burning vehicles with no remedy for the surviving family.
One way you can solve for this is strict products liability. Normally we ask if there's a defect in design or negligence. That produces costly litigation where a lay panel reviews a bunch of technical engineering documents with no special training, with highly varying outcomes. Instead, just have the manufacturer pay some statutory compensation whenever their product causes harm. The social harm of the thing will be borne by its purchasers.
It's hard to do that with car accidents though, because driver error contributes so much to outcomes, it's often weird to punish the company.
But we could vastly simplify the auto insurance system and improve the safety of these vehicles by forcing them to just warranty against harm once drivers are out as a factor. (Insofar as a warranty is a promise not to do harm with a fixed penalty up front based on breach.)
It would be fitting if such a statutory regime were the earliest primary laws about AI, because that would officially make a requirement that ai does not harm humans into literally the first law of robotics.
The chance someone will cause a grave accident and the chance someone is insolvent are not independent variables.
You get some real horror stories in law school about people trapped in burning vehicles with no remedy for the surviving family.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-Wide_Volkswagen_Corp._...
One way you can solve for this is strict products liability. Normally we ask if there's a defect in design or negligence. That produces costly litigation where a lay panel reviews a bunch of technical engineering documents with no special training, with highly varying outcomes. Instead, just have the manufacturer pay some statutory compensation whenever their product causes harm. The social harm of the thing will be borne by its purchasers.
It's hard to do that with car accidents though, because driver error contributes so much to outcomes, it's often weird to punish the company.
But we could vastly simplify the auto insurance system and improve the safety of these vehicles by forcing them to just warranty against harm once drivers are out as a factor. (Insofar as a warranty is a promise not to do harm with a fixed penalty up front based on breach.)
It would be fitting if such a statutory regime were the earliest primary laws about AI, because that would officially make a requirement that ai does not harm humans into literally the first law of robotics.