People perception of autonomous vehicles: Legal and ethical issues

Abstract

In past five years, self-driving or autonomous cars have achieved a great milestone that now they are commercially available as the Waymo Company emerged from Google autonomous car has started its service in suburbs of Phoenix from December 2018. Autonomous cars are able to sense their surrounding environment and their control system is able to interpret that information to identify navigation paths, road barriers and traffic signals. The journey of autonomous cars produced many questions regarding legal and ethical issues of autonomous cars. These cars combine a variety of information from its sensors including radars, lidar, sonar, GPS and odometry for real-time decision making. In this article, we have reviewed the literature to understand primary questions related to liability, ethics, and legal issues. From the last six years, 523 papers were selected, which were further shortlisted on the basis of relevance. Finally, 84 papers were shortlisted to conclude the discussion on tort liability, products, and strict liability. The utilitarianism, deontological and virtue ethics theories were discussed in terms of writing ethical code for designing autonomous cars. These cars are expected to decrease accidents by centralized traffic system through inter-vehicle communication. Furthermore, an online survey of 2021 participants was conducted in five different countries to understand perception and trust on different autonomy levels in self-driving cars. The participants showed their level of trust from a safety perspective, their concern about one time cost in the start, need of legislation by local governments and fear of rising in unemployment due to autonomous cars. The results indicate mix perception where people want this technology but are concerned about legal and ethical implications. The paper is helpful for researchers, manufacturers and law enforcement agencies in the implementation of autonomous cars.