> Why would such a fund exist for something that can be pin-pointed directly at the party at fault?

People should still be compensated when accidents happen, without the drag caused by trial attorneys attempting to extract as much as possible from self-driving vehicle manufacturers (which is going to slow down progress).

The benefits of self-driving vehicles from reduced fatalities and accidents alone are so great that a process and funding needs to be in place to allow continued innovation (if done with safety put first).

> People should still be compensated when accidents happen, without the drag caused by trial attorneys attempting to extract as much as possible from self-driving vehicle manufacturers.

Of course but the current laws today can drag this out when people are involved; why would cars be any different?

> The benefits of self-driving vehicles from reduced fatalities and accidents alone are so great that a process and funding needs to be in place to allow continued innovation (if done with safety put first).

We don't do this in any other industry as far as I know. It's a weird mechanic to make the manufacturers of automatically driving cars off the hook from accidents.

I understand the intent but I don't know how that works within our current legal system and wouldn't that encourage cheap, shitty-built cars since companies won't need to be liable?

The problem with mandatory compensation programs (aside from granting legal immunity to private sector entities, which I disagree with), is that they tend to break the discovery process via way of circumvention.

The discovery phase of a case is how truly damning evidence often comes to light. A fantastic example of this would be the Toyota unintended acceleration debacle.[0] If it weren't for the discovery process in those cases, nobody would really know what a total mess Toyota's code was.

As far as self-driving cars are concerned, I've no doubt top tier companies like Google and Tesla are going to do the best job they can, but eventually everyone is going to be in the space, and when a company with an institutional disdain for proper safety-critical software engineering practices ends up killing people, I want their feet held to the fire.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437117

> I understand the intent but I don't know how that works within our current legal system and wouldn't that encourage cheap, shitty-built cars since companies won't need to be liable?

It works if you allow self-driving vehicle algorithms to be patented. You could then open them for public examination by a government agency.

If the algorithm performed to regulation agency expectations, accident victims would still be compensated for losses without punitive damages exacted.

Regulation isn't a magic bullet though. I've seen countless companies check the boxes of regulation for their software in the government space only to have them fail spectacularly because it was done as cheaply as possible.

Regulation will never cover all possibilities of a company acting shitty; if companies find ways to doing things cheaper and still being able to check that box just so they have no liability then they will do it.

I don't think these types of get-out-of-jail-free-cards, even though they're very well intentioned, are ultimately a good thing.

But time will tell either way :)

I didn't know a fund existed for vaccines but I found it might have an interesting application with self driving cars.

At its current state, self driving cars are not perfect. Roads were designed to be driven by people and it may take many years for road infrastructure and total adoption to properly support self driving cars. The one thing many will be able to agree on is there will be accidents and some people will be hurt at the fault of self driving cars but ultimately removing humans from driving will make roads a much safer place. The reason behind this particular vaccine fund (see link above) appears to align with problems that we will soon see as self driving cars hit the road and make mistakes but for the overall good.

>But a car crash will be very easy to figure out who's at fault.

There are lots of scenarios where a person avoids an accident that isn't clearly another driver's fault--skidding on ice, debris on road... Also cases involving pedestrians and bicyclists where it's arguably their fault but drivers still generally have the responsibility to not hit a child running out into the road.

Correct and in today's society that is covered through insurance. Are we saying we're eliminating the insurance industry for vehicles? That's essentially what this would do (the government basically assumes the role as insurance company).

The difference is that today, it's normally the case that it clearly isn't the car's fault--whatever combination of humans, pedestrians, bicyclists, and just acts of God it is. If the car's brakes don't work properly even though they've been properly maintained or an ignition switch fails, the manufacturer gets sued. The wrinkle with the scenario in question is that it's not normally the case that programmed instructions in a machine can play a role in an accident and that's considered to not be a fault of the company programming the machine.

I assume there would still be insurance. But if my self-driving car causes an accident, I certainly shouldn't be "at fault" from the perspective of my insurance premiums nor should I be able to be sued--as would be the case today.

> Are we saying we're eliminating the insurance industry for vehicles? That's essentially what this would do (the government basically assumes the role as insurance company).

Sort of. Self-driving vehicle manufacturers would self-insure.