Seite - (000598) - in Autonomes Fahren - Technische, rechtliche und gesellschaftliche Aspekte

Product Liability Issues in the U.S. and Associated Risk Management578 Jones magazine. Although the description below comes from a writer,9 it is similar in tone and impact to what a plaintiff’s lawyer might say about his or her client in an opening statement. Here is how the writer describes the accident: [A] woman, whom for legal reasons we will call Sandra Gillespie, pulled onto a Minnea polis highway in her new Ford Pinto. Riding with her was a young boy, whom we’ll call Robbie Carlton. As she entered a merge lane, Sandra Gillespie’s car stalled. Another car rear-ended hers at an impact speed of 28 miles per hour. The Pinto’s gas tank ruptured. Vapors from it mixed quickly with the air in the passenger compartment. A spark ignited the mixture and the car exploded in a ball of fire. Sandra died in agony a few hours later in an emergency hospital. Her passenger, 13-year-old Robbie Carlton, is still alive; he has just come home from another futile operation aimed at grafting a new ear and nose from skin on the few unscarred portions of his badly burned body. [11] In the courtroom, the young boy, so badly disfigured by the accident, would likely be sitting next to his attorney during the entire trial. The jury would be seated facing him, and watching him. The unspoken testimony of his catastrophic injuries would likely have at least an unconscious effect on the jurors watching him. Despite instructions from the judge not to permit sympathy, bias, or prejudice to sway their verdict, a car manufacturer defend- ing this case would have an difficult time at trial. In the Ford Pinto case, the 13-year-old boy, whose real name was Richard Grimshaw, received a jury award in the amount of over $2.5 million in compensatory damages and an award of punitive damages to punish and deter Ford in the amount of $125 million [15]. Part of the motivation for the large verdict was evidence during the trial of Ford’s apparently cold-hearted decision not to use fairly inexpensive parts in its cars that would have prevented the accident. Although the punitive damages award was later reduced in this case to $3.5 million [15], the Ford Pinto case shows the kind of award that is possible in an automobile product liability case following a catastrophic accident. At some future time when an AV manufacturer faces a product liability trial, we can expect to see accident victims seated in a courtroom with similar gruesome disfigurements and stories of out-of-control cars and tragic, frightful accidents. The defendant manufacturer’s engineering and business practices will come under scrutiny. And a jury will likely decide whether or not the manufacturer should be held responsible for the accidents. During an AV’s design phase, its manufacturer’s design team will have an opportunity to discuss and make engineering and business decisions about the design of its AVs. Team members will talk about safety efforts the manufacturer is willing to undertake. In these discussions, team members can think more clearly and assess risk more effectively by imagining themselves in a courtroom setting, defending their practices in litigation arising from a catastrophic accident. 9 The writer is using pseudonyms for the names of the crash victims, evidently before the names of the victims became public.