Autonomous vehicle crash rules: who lives, who dies?

Ford Motor Company executive chairman, Bill Ford Jr, says governments must legislate to decide how autonomous cars will respond to split-second life-or-death scenarios.

The ethics over how a self-driving car's artificial intelligence should prioritise who it saves in a lose/lose situation will be up to governments, not car-makers said Ford Jr earlier in the week in Washington DC.

The challenge will be figuring out whether cars should aim to protect the driver or the highest number of people in potential danger.

He reiterated the commonly held view that developing and manufacturing driverless cars and autonomous trucks is not the hard part. Indeed, hundreds of development vehicles are already cruising around in Europe and the USA and Ford says by 2021 it'll have a taxi fleet with no steering wheel or pedals.

The tricky part will be in 30 years time when there's millions of self-driving cars on the road and collisions, casualties and fatalities inevitably occur.

"The difficult piece is going to be all the enabling things around it. Things like ethics, things like regulations," said Ford, as reported by Detroitnews.com.

"Ethics in the vehicle itself, i.e. does the vehicle make the decision to save you, the occupant, or to save 10 pedestrians if the right thing might be to hurt you the occupant?

"Those all have to be thought through and no one manufacturer is going to be able to program in one ethical equation that is different than the others. I mean, that would be chaos. And imagine the fun the trial lawyers would have with that too."

Two European car makers, Volvo and Audi, have already said they would accept all liability in any autonomous car crash.

"There can be no grey zone whatsoever [regarding] who is responsible," Anne-Catherine Thore Olsson, Volvo's 90 Vehicle Line senior director told carsales.com.au in mid-2016. "We would not accept anything less than a system that is good enough for us to take full responsibility."

Audi board member for sales and marketing Dr Dietmar Voggenreiter, had much the same to say: "If we take the wheel and the driver is allowed to sit there and write emails, then we are responsible."

That's all well and good, but as Ford Jr explains taking responsibility away from the driver needs governance.

Ford said governments will also have to address potential job losses for industries such as truck and cab drivers.

Greg Walden, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Reuters this week that a new package of overriding federal laws governing self-driving vehicles was being fast-tracked to match the pace of development.

"We're getting very close. I think it's a good package. We've put a lot of work into it," Walden said, noting it could be ready within two months.

Meanwhile, here in Australia, the complexity of the motor vehicle act – which differs in various states – will be a huge hurdle, one of the federal government will have to face sooner rather than later. Lump in the insurance ramifications and we're going to looking at a number of very different road rules.