Who loses when cars stop crashing?

Sometimes progress puts you out of business.

Who’s afraid of the self-driving car? Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images, illustration by ChatGPT.

I’m not surprised that Uber drivers are upset about driverless cars taking away their jobs. I’m not surprised that urbanists are concerned that driverless cars might produce even more car dependency. That people have narrow self-interests that they use to determine whether they support or oppose new changes is fine. But sometimes, our interest-group-driven system produces outcomes that just feel, well, kind of evil.

Last week, economist Alex Tabarrok wrote about how trial lawyers have emerged as a substantial force lobbying against autonomous vehicles (AVs).

Suing people over serious life-altering motor vehicle injuries is big business. It’s big business that, if self-driving vehicles begin to dominate roadways, could shrink dramatically. Apparently trial lawyer associations have been attuned to that possibility for some time.¹

In 2018, they helped kill a U.S. Senate bill that would have laid out regulatory provisions for self-driving cars. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., complained later that the trial lawyers opposed the bill even after Congress had added many of the changes the lobbying group had asked for:

“It should be clear from the history of this process that Republicans and Democrats on this panel worked very hard with your organization to get sign-off and support when we first moved this bill,” Walden said. “[W]hen Senate Republicans and Democrats ceded to the provisions you were seeking, you still didn’t support the deal.”

Are trial lawyers evil ghouls who want people to die so they can sue over their deaths?

The 36,000 to 40,000 Americans who die in car crashes each year — along with the tens of thousands more who are gravely injured — are a significant fount of personal injury lawsuits, worth something like $47 billion a year.

These facts make the trial lawyers sound like evil ghouls who want people to die so they can sue over their deaths. That’s definitely the interpretation that a lot of people jumped to, and I’m not saying I can rule it out. However, I want to give the lawyers’ stance its due first: