Self-driving car accident raises legal question

General Motors is in a race to be the first company to mass produce self-driving cars, but a recent crash with a San Francisco motorcyclist has illustrated the challenge of assigning blame when an autonomous vehicle gets in an accident.

As self-driving cars take to the roads in increasing numbers, collisions with standard vehicles are inevitable, experts say, as are lawsuits.

San Francisco commercial photographer Oscar Nilsson sued GM on Monday, after a Dec. 7 collision with a Chevrolet Bolt that aborted a lane change while driving autonomously.

The crash highlights an important issue raised by autonomous technology: Self-driving vehicles may not behave like those driven by humans, and that may complicate investigations into who’s at fault.

“That’s going to continue to be a huge area where we’re going to have problems,” said John Simpson, spokesman for nonprofit Consumer Watchdog, a frequent critic of speedy deployment of autonomous vehicles.

GM’s subsidiary, Cruise, has since August been testing a selfdriving car service in San Francisco with human backup drivers behind the wheel, as required by the state.

Nilsson’s lawsuit claims he was riding behind one of GM’s autonomous Bolts on Oak Street, when the car, with its backup driver, changed lanes to the left. When he rode forward, the Bolt suddenly veered back into his lane and knocked him to the ground, according to the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Police Department’s report on the incident blamed Nilsson for passing a vehicle on the right when it wasn’t safe, but Nilsson’s lawyer, Sergei Lemberg, disputed that finding.

“I don’t know what a police officer can tell, after the fact,” Lemberg said. “I don’t know that it’s fair to blame this act on the completely innocent person who’s just driving down the road and gets hit.”

The police report, said Lemberg, supported holding GM responsible. It noted that after the Bolt determined it couldn’t make the lane change, and began moving back while Nilsson was passing on the right, the Bolt’s backup driver tried to grab the wheel and steer away, but the collision occurred simultaneously.

A crash report filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles by GM provided a much different view of the accident. The company acknowledged that the car, in autonomous-driving mode in heavy traffic, had aborted a lane change. But GM said that as its car was “re-centering itself” in the lane, Nilsson, who had been riding between two lanes in a legal-in-California practice known as lane-splitting, “moved into the center lane, glanced the side of the Cruise ... wobbled, and fell over.”