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Who Do You Sue For A Self-Driving Truck Accident?

Self-driving trucks are becoming increasingly common on public roads and highways. While they have many benefits over human truck drivers including safety, they aren't perfect. So what happens if you get into an accident with a self-driving truck?

Who Do You Sue in a Self-Driving Truck Accident?

If you get into an accident with a truck, you may think that you should sue the driver. That logic follows the fact that you would sue the driver of a car in a car accident. The difference is that a car accident usually involves a car that's privately owned by the person driving it. Trucks are often owned by corporations and the driver is just an employee. Even when the driver owns the truck, since they're driving as a business, things are still different than a car accident.

Your lawyer might still advise you to name the truck driver in any lawsuit, but most of the time, you're going to sue the trucking company. In a self-driving truck crash, there's no driver, so you might just sue the truck company only. However, there may actually be a "driver" in the sense that the truck company is renting the self-driving technology instead of operating it themselves. In that case, there would be a separate "driver" who you might need to name in the lawsuit just to make sure you're accounting for every possibility.

What About Insurance?

In a perfect world, the insurance company would immediately honor your claim and give you full compensation. That rarely happens since the insurance company is often trying to increase their profits by avoiding paying claims.

The fact that a truck was self-driving doesn't change anything about insurance. The truck company still has to carry insurance, and their insurance still has to pay if a failure of the technology or a mechanical problem led to the crash.

How Can a Self-Driving Truck Cause an Accident?

You may also be wondering how a self-driving truck can cause an accident, since you need to prove fault to win your accident case. The technology isn't perfect and may not detect another car or send a signal to turn or brake in time. Even when a robot is driving, a truck can still have a mechanical failure like bad brakes or a blown tire causing it to lose control. These would all be indications that the truck was at fault.

To learn more about how to recover for your self-driving truck accident, contact one of your local truck accident attorneys today.


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