Missouri should not create special liability rules for autonomous vehicles

A version of the following public comment was submitted to the Missouri Senate Transportation, Infrastructure and Public Safety Committee on April 6, 2026.

Our assessment of House Committee Substitutes House Bills 2069 and 2208 is based on my more than 15 years of research on the law and policy related to driving automation. We share the goal of ensuring the safe operation of automated driving systems on public roadways. We believe singling out autonomous vehicles for special treatment on liability determination, however, is unnecessary to advancing the safe operation of these vehicles.

Adjusting liability determination for autonomous vehicles is premature

HCS HBs 2069 and 2208 would amend the Missouri Revised Statutes to assign autonomous vehicle liability for both product defects and negligence in operation.

The goal of ensuring injured parties are compensated after a crash by the responsible entities is admirable. However, the bill, as amended, would not add clarity for the simple reason that common law tort liability can likely evolve to address the specific circumstances introduced by automated driving systems. To date, there is no evidence that existing liability standards are inadequate. If gaps emerge following litigation, lawmakers would then be justified in specifically identifying and addressing them. At present, though, this time has not arrived, and singling out autonomous vehicles for special treatment is inappropriate.

Analytically, the challenge is a lack of understanding of both the nature and scope of the alleged problem. With respect to product liability law, noted automated driving legal scholar Bryant Walker Smith framed the difficult task for those seeking to modify liability standards as follows:

Those who conclude that these are also problems to be solved should proceed deliberately. They should assess whether the underlying challenges relate to liability exposure or to liability uncertainty; distinguish between reducing the costs of injury and merely shifting those costs; identify the negative externalities of today’s systems before assuming the positive externalities of tomorrow’s systems; and be wary of inadvertently placing new technologies on one side of old battle lines. Long after automated driving is a reality, these are the kinds of issues that humans will still be navigating. (Automated Driving and Product Liability, Mich. St. L. Rev. 1 (2017))

Dozens of states have enacted legislation authorizing the operation of vehicles equipped with automated driving systems. These states have accepted that, at least at present, existing liability rules are adequate to deal with questions involving injuries and responsible parties arising from the use of these technologies. They have rejected proposals to single out autonomous vehicles for special liability treatment because lawmakers were concerned about the uncertainty this would introduce to technology deployment. As originally introduced, HBs 2069 and 2208 likewise avoided these problems.

To date, autonomous vehicles have logged more than 200 million miles in commercial operation on U.S. public roadways. While this is a very small share of total vehicle-miles of travel in the United States, the safety benefits of deploying this technology at scale appear to be very large. Research by leading global reinsurance company Swiss Re and autonomous vehicle developer Waymo found that Waymo’s automated driving system is already far safer than that of a typical human driver. Their study analyzed 25.3 million fully autonomous miles driven by Waymo, along with 500,000 insurance claims and over 200 billion miles of driving exposure. Swiss Re and Waymo found that, compared with human drivers, Waymo’s automated driving system resulted in an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims. It is worth noting that Missouri’s urban roadways are the most dangerous in the Midwest. According to Reason Foundation’s 29th Annual Highway Report, Missouri ranked 30th for its urban highway fatality rate, exceeding Illinois (#23), Indiana (#19), Iowa (#24), Kansas (#8), Michigan (#22), Minnesota (#1), Nebraska (#13), North Dakota (#2), Ohio (#18), and South Dakota (#10).

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