Operators of vehicles need to be held personally responsible for the damages caused by putting their vehicles on the road, whether the vehicle is autonomous or not. Additionally there must be a responsibility for manufacturers to not create faulty products, but that can not absolve the "operator" of the product. It should not be said that the "operator" of a Volvo autonomous vehicle is not responsible for the actions of the vehicle under her control, simply because Volvo says they accept full liability. I think your chauffeur analogy is flawed. If I set cruise control in my car to 75mph in a 25mph school zone, am I not liable? It is not possible to delegate our personal responsibilities to machines, and wash our hands of it.
Volvo's acceptance of liability seems little more than a smart business decision- the cost of an insurance payout to the family of the deceased is less than the money they stand to earn in profit from selling autonomous vehicles. We can't allow this generous actuarial calculation to absolve the operator of such a vehicle of responsibility too. If you don't like it, take the train.
Imagine that your only recourse is to go after some big faceless corporation whose immensely complex algorithm failed in some highly unusual way, and no one can really say what happened, not even the engineers who wrote it (and some of whom might have long left the company...)
It's similar to the situation with companies like Google blocking people who have no easy way to get support, except more morbid.
I'm not fond of living in such a world where personal responsibility is dissolved and becomes meaningless.
So if a cab gets in an accident, then the person who hail'd the cab should be liable? What if it is an autonomous cab? If an automated elevator fails and kills someone, is the person that pushed the call button liable?
This is something that I really don't like about our society, the fact that someone "must" take be responsible. When someone goes on a shooting spree, of course they should go to jail. But if they die in the process of committing their crime, there is almost always an outcry for the next person in line to be responsible.
We have rules about elevators. There are elevator inspectors who regularly certify elevator safety, and they are liable if they falsely attest as to its good working order. The owner of the building is also responsible for maintaining their own elevator. There isn't anything the passenger of an elevator can do to meaningfully affect its operation or safety. I suppose if you knew there was someone working in the elevator shaft and you pushed the button to hurt them, you would be responsible for that.
We have rules about motor vehicle operation. The operator is responsible. If you are the passenger in the back seat of a cab, the driver is responsible, not the passenger. If there is nobody else and you are the pilot of an autonomous vehicle, you have to assume responsibility for your vehicle and its actions.
The individual operator (the driver, or the person in the operator seat who presses the "engage autonomous mode" on the car) is the one who chose to buy a vehicle and put it on the road, potentially endangering other people. We need to be responsible for our own actions and the situations we create.
Is their a gun shop owner liable for murder (and/or wrongful death) every time someone is killed with a firearm? What about the clerks at the gun store? Or the truck driver who delivered the firearm to the store? All of their respective actions clearly created a situation where people have died; your position is silly.
You are assigning blame further up the chain, which I am not doing. I stated in my first post that I do believe the manufacturer is liable for their faulty products, but can not be SOLELY responsible. I might find the gun shop owner for selling a faulty or damaged gun, for example if there was a recall and they ignored it.
If you bought a faulty gun with a broken safety catch, and waved it around in a crowded street, and it fired, killing someone, you should be held personally liable. You brought the gun out in public and created the scenario which caused someone to be hurt by it.
What if the ammunition was faulty, and a case of it blew up in someones car killing a pedestrian next to it? Or a gas leak in the fuel line that dripped onto a faulty underground electric cable, igniting and causing injury?
I don't know what the threshold is in other countries, but Canada has a vague but useful threshold: "knew or ought to have known". A different way it's been stated in the courts is "what a reasonably prudent person ought to have known"
Looking at the fuel line question through that lens: did the leak start while you were driving and you were completely unaware? Or has it been leaking for a while and you just haven't gotten around to fixing it.
With the ammunition, how was it stored? Was it dumped in a toolbox filled with pointy screws? (A reasonably prudent person ought to know that ammunition is fired by striking the primer with a sharp object). Was it stored in the front seat of the car on the hottest day of summer? (A reasonably prudent person would expect it to get really hot in there)
Etc. Etc. The thing about negligence is that there's a lot of room for interpretation. As another example, if you've been driving a car around with self-driving features, and you've experienced it behaving erratically multiple times, and that's followed by an accident... you knew or ought to have known that it was dangerous to be on the road in that vehicle. If there was an OTA update for the autopilot last night that installed silently, and it results in a crash, then it's probably the manufacturer who's liable.
Volvo's acceptance of liability seems little more than a smart business decision- the cost of an insurance payout to the family of the deceased is less than the money they stand to earn in profit from selling autonomous vehicles. We can't allow this generous actuarial calculation to absolve the operator of such a vehicle of responsibility too. If you don't like it, take the train.