10 page research paper

Background

By 1953 a scale model of an automated highway system was developed, which could be used for steering and maintaining proper following distance, this was one of the first important steps in developing autonomous driving. Now almost 65 years later we have many different car companies developing their versions of autonomous driving cars, we are currently in the age where the development of this technology is speeding up rapidly. There are multiple autonomous cars on our roads right now, and we expect this number to increase rapidly over the coming years. In 2009 Google was one of the first companies that developed autonomous vehicles allowed to drive on our roadways, their success attracted many car manufacturers to develop autonomous vehicles speeding up the development and improving our current technology.

Autonomous vehicles will be the future because compared to human-driven vehicles autonomous vehicles have a lot of advantages. When most of our cars driven are autonomous, traffic will be safer. According to a study by the ENO Center for Transportation (ENO, 2013), deaths would fall from 33,000 to 11,300 if 90% of cars on the American roads would be autonomous vehicles. The Safer driving means that the traffic will be faster if fewer accidents are happening there will be less traffic congestion. However, there are some problems with autonomous driving right now especially the rules in most areas haven’t been updated to support autonomous driving and the big question on who is going responsible in the case of an accident and its effect on car insurance. Insurance companies do not have policies to support autonomous driving right now. This discussion is going to play a significant role in the future of our car insurance.

The issue in the autonomous car is that if the human were not driving, how insurance is going to be work? Who is responsible for the accident? Maybe the car manufacturer will be responsible for accidents caused by their vehicles instead of the car driver. Currently, many ideas are trying to solve these problems. For example, in the research by Carrie Schroll "creating a national car insurance fund to pay for accidents in autonomous vehicles." She recommends setting up a National Insurance Fund to pay for all damages caused by autonomous vehicles (Schroll, 2015). The National Insurance Fund is a great example of a solution to the problem. For another example, the 2016 RAND study suggested that the shift in responsibility from the driver to the manufacturer may make a case for a form of no-fault automobile insurance. No-fault automobile insurance means that there won't be lawsuits for car crashes, but the driver will quickly get compensated, and no one is held responsible (McChristian & Corbett, 2016, p. 9).

References

Gurney, J. K. (2013, December). SUE MY CAR NOT ME: PRODUCTS LIABILITY AND ACCIDENTS INVOLVING AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES. Retrieved May 26, 2017, from http://illinoisjltp.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Gurney.pdf

McChristian, L., & Corbett, R. (2016). Regulatory Issues Related to Autonomous Vehicles. Journal Of Insurance Regulation, 35(7), 1-15.

NELSON, R. (2017, May). No ticketing for autonomous vehicles?. EE: Evaluation Engineering. pp. 2-3.

This article is about ticketing autonomous vehicles. The author assumes that in the future the autonomous car might not get the ticket. Moreover, the author used one example from

Preparing a Nation for Autonomous Vehicles; Opportunities, Barriers and Policy Recommendations. (2013, October). Retrieved May 12, 2017, from https://www.enotrans.org/wp-content/uploads/AV-paper.pdf

Schroll, C. (2015). Splitting The Bill: Creating a National Car Insurance Fund to Pay for Accidents in Autonomous Vehicles. Northwestern University Law Review, 109(3), 803-833.