Fault-y Reasoning

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) hold great promise to improve personal and commercial travel, but intelligently linking vehicles and travelers via increasingly interconnected real-time data systems creates a host of new and largely untested liability questions when things go wrong. In this article, we examine current policies, laws, and administrative codes guiding ITS liability by reviewing the scholarly literature and case law in the United States. We find (a) a patchwork of industry self-regulation, (b) a modicum of tort case law precedent that varies substantially across states, (c) many unresolved questions, and (d) little prospect of guiding federal legislation on the horizon. While the liability questions raised by driverless cars have received much attention, we conclude that ITS liability standards are likely to be settled incrementally in the near term on decidedly narrow grounds via case law on navigation and collision-avoidance systems, long before fully automated vehicles are deployed.