Autonomous Driving and the Legal Challenges of Allocating Liability

🚗 On 28 April 2026, the DSI Communities AI & Law and Mobility came together for a joint workshop on one of the open questions in autonomous driving: when an autonomous vehicle causes harm, who is responsible?

⚖️ Prof. Dr. Rolf Weber (UZH, Faculty of Law) opened on civil liability, walking through the options regulators are weighing — from traditional product liability to newer ideas like a “reasonable computer driver” standard — and where Swiss law currently sits: responsibility falling first on the car owner, with recourse routed through contract, product, or tort law.

⚖️ Prof. Dr. Nadine Zurkinden (UZH, Faculty of Law) carried the same question into criminal law, where the picture narrows: someone has to be in charge, and Swiss law still expects that someone to be human. Remote operation complicates this, opening real gaps around signal latency and the cues a tele-operator simply cannot perceive from a distance.

🧠 Dr. Johanna Wörle (ETH Zurich, Chair of Geoinformation Engineering) closed by showing what those gaps look like in practice. In her test-track study in Singapore, more immersive setups raised tele-operators’ sense of presence and led to more careful driving — but not for everyone. Some participants treated the remote car like a video game, crashing into barriers without much reaction even knowing a real person was inside. A reminder that liability frameworks ultimately rest on assumptions about how seriously people take consequences they don’t personally face.

💬 The breakout discussion afterwards brought lawyers and mobility researchers into the same small groups to work through case scenarios together — the kind of cross-community exchange these workshops are designed for. The conversation continued at the Apéro 🥂

🙏 Thank you to our speakers, and to everyone who joined.