Let's talk about #Mercedes vehicles equipped with #DrivePilot a bit - a Level 3-capable vehicle that has been recently "approved" in a handful of US states.
This article almost entirely focuses on the legal dynamics of consumer liability should this vehicle create a direct (or, presumably, an indirect) incident.
But, as always, I want to talk about what I feel are the #SystemsSafety realities at work here and the many foot-guns that are associated with that.
Put simply, per the #SAE#J3016 standard (which is not safety standard), this is a vehicle that is capable (by definition, not necessarily in practice) of detecting a certain amount of failures to the Dynamic Driving Task (DDT) within a certain Operational Design Domain (ODD).
With some exceptions, the human driver can (theoretically) remain inattentive to the performance of the DDT until the automated system demands that they regain operational control.
Distilled from that verbose definition, the image below is how #Mercedes describes the capabilities of their vehicle.
On paper, a strict "vehicle control responsibility" separation seemingly exists.
The Mercedes vehicle drives until "it can't" and then, after a sufficient warning time provided by the vehicle, the human driver regains situational awareness and operational control of the vehicle.
Humans are not machines and human drivers are not homogeneous and it is entirely unclear how long of the duration of this "warning time" needs to be in an infinite number of conditions.
That is what is called #HumanFactors considerations, in part.
But let us put the "human element" out-of-mind here.
I submit it is not necessary here.
Let's get back to the article - and, in particular, a statement by one of the legal experts cited within it:
The legal expert cited, Professor William Widen, and Professor Phil Koopman have offered their thoughts on attributing liability (between the vehicle and the human driver), as linked to in the article.
The core issue, again put simply, is that law enforcement is structurally ill-equipped to take full, immediate control of the vehicle and secure a (physical and digital) chain-of-custody when an incident occurs with these vehicles.
That is it.
What will instead happen is that law enforcement, courts, regulators and insurance companies will be at the complete mercy of #Mercedes (in this case) in terms of vehicle data and, most probably, an interpretation of the events.
Now, you, as the human driver are also effectively at the mercy of #Mercedes!
The laws on the books do not matter.
And the considerable "friction" of pursuing an open-ended legal claim against Mercedes' data advantages will always work against you.
The #NTSB, the US's independent transportation safety investigator, foresaw this asymmetric data relationship as far back as 2016 - and, naturally, the US's hapless auto safety regulator, the #NHTSA, simply ignored it.
All of this means that the "warning time", no matter what anyone or any law says, is actually 0 seconds.
And consumers should recognize this because consumers are (and will increasingly be) being covertly and dangerously misled.
Level 3-capable vehicles cannot have a clear delineation of human driver liability if governments cannot commit to maintaining a chain-of-custody and an independent, forensic investigation of all incidents.
And, spoiler, governments will not commit to that.
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