AI in PI: Artificial Intelligence in Personal Injury, including Mass Torts AI

For many years, plaintiffs’ attorneys have pondered how autonomous vehicles will impact PI litigation. Questions like, who is liable when an autopilot car crashes, get us geeking out.

We almost had what may have been our first trial involving autonomous driving. Reurters reports, “Tesla (TSLA.O) as settled a lawsuit over a 2018 car crash that killed an Apple engineer after his Model X, operating on Autopilot, swerved off a highway near San Francisco, court documents showed on Monday.“

The First Almost-Trial Raised Interested Issues Beyond the Technology

Product liability lawyers, tech geeks, etc. have often pondered questions focused on the role of the software, the design of autonomous vehicles. As reported by Reuters, the case does not seem to have been about the autopilot technology directly. Rather, it appears to have been a straight negligence styled matter.

Walter Huang died in 2018 after veering off the highway. His family alleged that Tesla’s Autopilot steered his 2017 Model X into a highway barrier.

Their “lawyers asked a Tesla witness whether the company knew drivers would not watch the road when using its driver-assistance system, Reuters reported last month citing deposition transcripts.” Sounds like straight up foreseeability, not really about the technology itself, more a consequence of it. Defendants blamed the victim alleging misuse because he was playing video games. It gets circular in a sense because that was sort of the point – does the company know people are treating this thing as a chauffer so they can engage in other activites?

Autonomous Driving Related Injuries Continue to Rise.

Reuters notes that there are hundreds of vehicular collisions in which folks allege Autopilot is a factor. “The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has examined at least 956 crashes in which Autopilot was initially reported to have been in use. The agency separately launched more than 40 investigations into accidents involving Tesla automated-driving systems that resulted in 23 deaths.”