Page - (000624) - in Autonomes Fahren - Technische, rechtliche und gesellschaftliche Aspekte

60327.5 Raise the Playing Field that could avoid many of the common errors of human drivers but that could not avoid catastrophic multicar freeway pileups to the extent physically possible. In other words, it may be prudent to accept some failures in order to expedite larger successes. Moreover, attempting to design an automated vehicle to handle every conceivable driving scenario may introduce complexity that is poorly understood, unmanageable, and ultimately detrimental to safety. Again, for example, designing an automated vehicle to rapidly accelerate through a pileup-in-progress might lead to programming oversights that could cause that same vehicle to errantly speed up after entering a closed construction zone. Here it may be prudent to accept some failures in order to prevent even more catastrophic failures. For both of these reasons, early generations of automated vehicles may necessarily limit the technical challenges that they attempt to solve. These vehicles might be deployed into simplified environments at lower speeds [22]. Or they might continue to rely in part on human drivers [29], particularly if those humans are professionals who can be carefully trained, closely monitored, and sufficiently incentivized. Sound engineering may demand additional limitations. For example, it may be prudent to program an automated vehicle to never speed, to always slow to a stop in the event of a detected failure, or to always permit human override within a set number of seconds. These stylized examples might mean that, in occasional cases, an automated vehicle will crash because it has failed to accelerate or because it has stopped or because its human driver has made poor decisions while panicking. Although these should be primarily technical determinations, law may be able to play a supporting role. In some jurisdictions, for example, the plaintiff in a product liability case must demonstrate that an alternative product design was available and superior to the one alleged to have contributed to her injury. In such a case, it may be appropriate to give more weight to counterarguments about the complexity, uncertainty, and delay inherent in such designs. There are, however, two important cautions. First, for those injuries that do occur, this strategy merely shifts more of the risk to those people who have been injured. This conse- quence highlights the need for a sufficient social safety net, whether provided through public insurance, private insurance, or another means. Second, codifying a ceiling on the performance required could mean calcifying the level of reasonable design for technologies that may quickly be capable of much more. 27.5 Raise the Playing Field 27.5.1 Reject the Status Quo The reality that human drivers often violate rules of the road prompts speculation that programming automated vehicles to comply with these rules would reduce their appeal. Suggestions for addressing this perceived disadvantage have included expressly permitting