Skip to main content

VW Seeking Industry Alliance for Self-driving Cars, Legal Protection for When They Crash

Volkswagen Group is interested in teaming up with other automakers to establish a new industry standard for self-driving technology. While the move would likely help streamline development, VW’s primary concern seems to be legal protection in the event an autonomous vehicle makes a mistake.

The idea of an automaker preparing itself to better cope with the legal ramifications of accidentally killing one of its customers isn’t particularly encouraging, but it’s at least understandable.

Pushing for an industry standard for new tech is commonplace within the automotive sector. Last year, several manufacturers adopted Automotive Grade Linux in an attempt to create a default, open-sourced platform for in-car infotainment. While similar in concept to the standardizing of autonomous technology, the obvious difference is that there usually aren’t lives riding on infotainment systems.

There have, however, been several incidents where autonomous technology and advanced driving aids have failed over the last two years, resulting in a loss of human life and extremely negative publicity. As self-driving solutions are still in development, more accidents will likely arise in the coming years. Volkswagen simply wants to establish an alliance to share development costs and liability claims.

VW’s plans are not yet public, though Automotive News spoke with an anonymous VW executive who outlined the company’s corporate goals and described why they’re being put into place. “When you are involved in an accident, you have a better chance in court when you can prove that your car adheres to the latest technical standard,” the individual said.

“How do you create an industry standard? Ideally, by getting others to use the same sensor kit and software, so for that reason an overarching cooperation between automakers is one of the options we are examining,” continued the VW executive. “The question is: How do we bring products to market that guarantee we made ourselves as small a target for damage claims as possible?”

It sounds a little diabolical on the surface. But it’s not simply a matter of VW figuring out how to best cover its ass in the event of a disaster. Standardizing things helps to create a more level playing field, allowing automakers to tell regulators and courtrooms they followed the agreed-upon actions and weren’t shirking responsibility.

That issue isn’t helped by the lax regulation of autonomous technologies. While giving automakers and tech companies a green light to test whatever systems they think might work has helped, governments helped accelerate development. But the byproduct is a nearly complete lack of legal protection for both the manufacturers of these vehicles and the general public. “Law firms are already in the starting blocks,” the executive said.

Volkswagen is believed to be in discussions with more than 15 different companies, including automakers, concerning the prospective alliance. But standardizing a technology that’s dependent on countless systems, many of them proprietary, isn’t going to be easy. It’s also going to be difficult to get every member group to commit to terms when some are leading the charge into the autonomous revolution, while others are just leaving the self-driving nest.

From Automotive News:

A key criterion when considering partners is whether all can agree that the technology would be open source, meaning there was no restriction on its use by participants. This would also help with ensuring tests were comparable, so validation data from one party would be applicable to all.

Some companies have approached Volkswagen offering to license it a drop-in solution, but this is considered out of the question. VW believes it must gain expertise in all elements of the artificial intelligence down to a self-driving vehicle’s path planning. Simply integrating a supplier’s “black box” into the vehicle without access to the technology behind it would not be acceptable.

However, it might be worth it to share some of the inevitable legal pitfalls associated with self-driving vehicles. “I don’t believe we are the only ones asking ourselves if we really want to take these kinds of risks,” the VW staffer said. “No one wants a repeat of the Uber accident.”

That incident involved a self-driving Volvo XC90 testbed owned by Uber. In spring of this year, the vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian crossing the street in Tempe, Arizona. Its systems completely failed to identify the individual or make any attempt to brake, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. While the police report faulted the backup driver for negligence after on-board cameras caught the individual watching a cellphone video, Uber still settled with the victim’s family out of court.

Options for an alliance could be presented to the VW Group management board as early as next month.

a version of this article first appeared on thetruthaboutars.com

The post VW Seeking Industry Alliance for Self-driving Cars, Legal Protection for When They Crash appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex https://ift.tt/2Op2PZs
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...

Bugatti Chiron Won’t Get a Roadster Version

The all-new Bugatti Chiron hypercar will not get a convertible version like its Veyron predecessor did. Speaking to Autocar at the London grand opening of the sole Bugatti showroom in the U.K., marketing boss Stefan Brungs confirmed that the French automaker’s latest hypercar will only be sold in coupe format, with “no roadster or convertible” version in the plans. Brungs also said that the company is only planning on selling the allotted 500 Chirons as standard, so faster variants like a Super Sports version also aren’t likely. This is a very different strategy than the Veyron, which has targa top Grand Sport and Super Sports models, as well as a number of special edition models. The Chiron is set to try to break the world record for fastest car and attempt to beat the Veyron’s record of 268 mph. It is believed that the Chiron will be able to hit 288 mph. Powered by an 8.0-liter W16 engine with 1,500 horsepower and 1,106 pound-feet of torque, it shouldn’t ...

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...