Practice Areas

Waymo and Autonomous Vehicle Accidents in Los Angeles

If a driverless car hits you in Los Angeles, there is no driver to exchange information with. Call 911 if anyone is hurt, ask police to respond, photograph the vehicle and its license plate, and report the crash to the company. The vehicle records what happened, and that data can be preserved.

First Steps

What to Do After a Crash With a Driverless Vehicle

The ordinary script does not work. California law tells the driver of a vehicle involved in an injury crash to stop, give a name and address, provide the vehicle registration and the owner’s name and address, and render reasonable assistance. Those duties come from Vehicle Code section 20001 and Vehicle Code section 20003. When the front seat is empty, there is nobody standing there to hand you any of it.

Here is what happens instead.

• Call 911 first. If anyone is injured, medical care comes before everything else. Ask that a police report be taken. In Los Angeles that will usually be LAPD, or the California Highway Patrol on a freeway.
• Photograph the vehicle itself. The license plate, the company markings, the sensor housings, the damage, and the position of both vehicles. Autonomous vehicles are individually identifiable, and the plate is how the company locates the specific car and its logs.
• Expect the company, not a driver, to make contact. Driverless operators run remote support teams. When a vehicle detects a collision, the operator is notified, can speak to anyone inside the car through its speakers or by phone, and can dispatch roadside assistance and emergency services.
• If you were riding inside. The operator’s rider app has a help function that connects you to support, and the in-car screen offers the same. Save the trip receipt and screenshot the ride, including the time, the route, and the vehicle.
• If you were outside the vehicle. You have no app and no trip record. Driverless operators publish a contact line for law enforcement, first responders, and collision reporting, and the police report and the operator’s rider app are the reliable routes to the current number. Reporting the crash creates a record on the company’s side with a date attached to it.
• Get examined the same day if you can. A gap between the crash and the first medical visit is a common reason a genuine injury gets discounted later.

You may also have reporting duties of your own. Vehicle Code section 20008 generally requires a driver in a crash causing injury or death to file a written report within 24 hours with the California Highway Patrol or the city police department. Vehicle Code section 16000 separately requires a driver to report to the DMV within 10 days when a crash causes injury, death, or property damage to any one person over $1,000.

The Rules Behind the Ride

Two Regulators Sit Behind Every Driverless Ride

California splits oversight of autonomous vehicles between two agencies, and the split matters because each one holds different records.

The Department of Motor Vehicles regulates the vehicle and the driving system. Vehicle Code section 38750 is the statute that authorizes all of it. It defines autonomous technology as technology capable of driving a vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring of a human operator, and it defines an autonomous vehicle as one meeting Level 3, Level 4, or Level 5 of the SAE International driving automation standard. Vehicles that only have driver assistance features such as adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, or automatic emergency braking are expressly excluded.

Section 38750 also sets the financial floor. A manufacturer testing an autonomous vehicle on California roads must first obtain an instrument of insurance, a surety bond, or proof of self-insurance in the amount of five million dollars, and must certify that it will maintain that same five million dollar amount to deploy. That is a permit condition, not a measure of what any claim is worth.

The California Public Utilities Commission regulates the passenger service. A company that wants to carry members of the public, and especially one that wants to charge for a driverless ride, needs CPUC authority on top of the DMV permit. Expanding a driverless passenger service into new territory, changing a passenger safety plan, and putting a new vehicle platform into service all run through the CPUC, so the scope of a company’s passenger authority on any given date is a matter of record with that agency.

Driverless passenger services operate in parts of Los Angeles, and the areas they cover expand over time, so a rider, a driver, or a pedestrian may encounter one anywhere in the region. What a given operator was permitted to do, and where, on the day of a crash is established from the DMV and CPUC records rather than from a map published later.

Evidence

The Evidence in These Cases Is Different

An ordinary intersection collision often comes down to two people describing the same three seconds in incompatible ways. A driverless vehicle case usually does not, because the car was recording.

Section 38750 requires a manufacturer, as a condition of deployment approval, to certify that the vehicle has a separate mechanism to capture and store autonomous technology sensor data for at least 30 seconds before a collision with another vehicle, object, or person while the vehicle is in autonomous mode. The statute says that data must be captured in a read-only format and preserved for three years after the date of the collision.

That is the anchor. Other categories worth demanding early:

• Sensor and perception data. Lidar, radar, and camera inputs, and the driving system’s own record of what it detected, classified, and predicted in the seconds before impact.
• Camera footage. Autonomous vehicles carry exterior cameras covering every direction, and many carry interior cameras as well.
• The event data recorder. The conventional crash recorder in the vehicle, capturing speed, braking, steering, and restraint data.
• Remote assistance records. Whether a human operator was contacted, what the vehicle asked, what guidance came back, and when.
• Software version and change history. Which build was running, whether it was subject to a recall or update, and whether the behavior at issue had been reported before.
• Maintenance and depot records. Sensor calibration, cleaning, tire and brake service, and any fault codes logged before the trip.
• The collision report to the DMV. California regulations require the manufacturer to report a collision involving an autonomous vehicle to the DMV, on a DMV form, within 10 days. Those reports are published by the DMV.

Preserving all of it starts with a written litigation hold letter sent to the operator, and where appropriate to the vehicle manufacturer and any maintenance contractor, identifying the vehicle by plate and the incident by date, time, and location, and asking that the data be retained rather than overwritten. Video from nearby businesses and doorbells is often gone within days, so that request goes out at the same time.

Potential Defendants

Who May Be Responsible

Nobody can tell you from a web page who is responsible for your crash. What can be described are the categories that may apply. More than one can be in play, and sometimes none of them is.

• The autonomous vehicle operator. The company that owns the fleet, holds the DMV and CPUC permits, dispatches the vehicles, and runs the driving system. Its own conduct, including how it tested, monitored, and maintained the vehicle, is a possible basis for a claim.
• The manufacturer of the vehicle or the software. California product liability law reaches design defects, manufacturing defects, and failures to warn. In an autonomous vehicle the alleged defect may sit in the driving system rather than in a mechanical part.
• A remote assistance operator. Some autonomous systems can ask a human for guidance in unusual situations. If a person supplied that guidance, what they were told and what they answered may matter.
• A maintenance or fleet services contractor. Sensors need calibration and cleaning, and vehicles need conventional service. Work done poorly, or not done, can be its own source of responsibility.
• Another human driver. A driverless vehicle is often not the cause. It may have been struck, cut off, or forced into a maneuver by a person driving an ordinary car, in which case the claim looks much like any other auto accident claim.
• A public entity. Where road design, signal timing, or a construction zone contributed, a government claim may be involved, and those claims carry much shorter deadlines than ordinary injury claims.

California uses pure comparative fault, which reduces a recovery by the injured person’s own share of responsibility without eliminating the claim. Which category actually applies is answered by the records, not by the theory.

Oversight and Timing

Federal Oversight, and the Clock on Your Claim

Autonomous driving systems are also subject to federal defect oversight by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which opens investigations and receives recall filings. Those investigations and recall filings become part of the public record, and software history can bear on how a crash happened.

A driving system is software, and software is revised. Which build was running on the day of a crash, what changed in the builds before and after it, whether the operator filed a recall covering that build, and whether federal regulators had questions open about the behavior at issue are all questions the records answer. A recall filing is a report by the company about its own software, and an investigation is an inquiry rather than a finding. Neither one decides a particular case, and what matters is whether either covers the vehicle and the software version involved in that crash.

Deadlines run regardless. Under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1, an action for injury to or the death of an individual caused by the wrongful act or neglect of another must generally be brought within two years. Claims involving a public entity typically require a written government claim on a much shorter timeline. And the practical deadline is usually earlier than the legal one, because the video and the logs age out first.

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

What Happens Next

How an Autonomous Vehicle Case Moves Forward

Most injury claims are resolved without a lawsuit ever being filed, and that stretch of the case has its own steps. Our guide to the pre-litigation process walks through medical treatment, records collection, the demand letter, and settlement negotiation.

When a claim cannot be resolved on fair terms, the next step is filing suit, and that is often where the sensor data and software history are formally demanded. Our guide to the litigation process covers each stage of a California lawsuit, from the complaint through discovery, mediation, and trial.