Who Is at the Wheel? Allocating Tort and Product Liability for Autonomous Vehicle Accidents

This article examines how tort negligence and product liability apportion blame for crashes involving automated and autonomous vehicles. The article evaluates compensation models, crash-reporting regulations, and litigation cases that reveal gaps in evidence for mixed control accidents involving varying degrees of vehicle automation. It conducts a comparative analysis of the regimes in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.

In these accidents, assigning either the human user or the manufacturer full responsibility for the crash reflects a misidentification of risk when the software performs dynamic driving and human intervention occurs sporadically. The article suggests a hybrid, functional standard of liability that includes a rebuttable presumption: manufacturers are primarily responsible for the design of systems, warnings, and failures during automated operation, whereas operators are responsible for misuse of the system or unreasonable failure to provide a takeover when requested. The framework operationalizes allocation through burden shifting, using event data logs, and supports insurer-first compensation via subrogation.

This strategy will enhance fairness, incentives, and safety governance amid the expansion of automation. Eva Silas is a Bachelor of Commerce student at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. Her interests focus on the intersection of business, technology, and law, and she plans to pursue a career in corporate law.