Regole per l'innovazione: responsabilità civile e assicurazione di fronte all'auto a guida (progressivamente) autonoma

Aimed at predicting the effects of the «collision» between self-driving car and liability rules, the paper is ideally divided into three parts. The first section is mainly historical: it traces the emergence of the first XX century’s liability rules specifically concerning cars, which replaced the ordinary rules of liability applicable. As far as this topic is concerned, article 2054 of the 1942 Italian Civil Code epitomized the result of this process. The second part focuses on the present, analyzing the problematic debut of driver assistance systems. In my opinion, these systems provides several issues laying at the core of any attempt to understand the legal treatment of autonomous vehicles. Among them the confusion between the concepts of autonomous driving and assisted driving and the debate about whether we should hold the product of the car responsible for the failures of semi-automated vehicles. The paper then analyses the current product liability’s legal framework in Europe and United States, as well as the economic aspects of civil liability: should the driver be considered responsible for the accident caused by her automated vehicle, the burden of liability might have a chilling effect on the marketing prospectives of this new technology. The third part of the paper is forward-looking: it discusses severql proposals to solve the «liability problem» related to accidents of autonomous cars. Scholars are divided between supporters of product liability and supporters of owner’s responsibility, but also between reformists and conservative. There are many compelling visions for adopting new liability rules: unfortunately, there seems to be also a lack of dialogue between national and supra-national legislators on a global scale. EU, USA, China, Japan are in this respect competitive regulators, as their regulative vision are heavily driven by the industrial interest at stake in the respective automotive industries. Harmonisation of rules should be the prerequisite to start reflecting on any proposal aimed at regulating this new technology.