Again, you missed the analogy raised by others. Is it negligent for an automaker to release a car with a 155mph top speed (or even higher) and not disable that speed on public roads? They certainly have the technology to do so (for example the Skyline GTR does that). Why haven't automakers done that broadly, and why haven't people called them negligent? Trying to answer that question will give you an idea of the point people are making.
Actually, in the UK heavy trucks are speed-limited to 56 mph, and in Japan most consumer cars are limited to 112 mph. Elsewhere, it's a different story, of course.
So far, nobody has attempted to answer that question. They've only cited fast cars as an existence proof that anything goes when it comes to negligence. I thought I answered it in a prior post, but I'm sure I did a terrible job, so I'll try again. I believe that cars are still designed to exceed public speed limits for the following reasons:
- When everyone else is exceeding the speed limit, it's safer if the car can, too.
- During an emergency, it may be necessary to exceed the speed limit.
- GPS and the automatic determination of speed limits is new technology, unproven, and unreliable. If such a system fails, the public can be at risk due to the points above. They're even more at risk should they be erroneously limited to a speed far below the speed limit (i.e. the system places them on the wrong road).
- If a consumer knows a car can go 155 mph, they know it has the power, and thus the acceleration, to operate safely in highway merge scenarios, etc. If it's limited, they begin to suspect it won't be able to accelerate safely. This perception is hard to overcome.
- The number of crashes caused by high speeds are relatively low. So low, in fact, that it would be cheaper for automakers to settle lawsuits than to suffer lost sales from speed-limited cars. It would likely take a federal law mandating governors before manufacturers would comply.
So, because restricting speed would actually decrease safety in some scenarios, and increase the liability of automobile manufacturers (points one, two, and three), there's been no precedent yet set where a court has ruled that automatically enforcing a geofencing speed governor can be implemented reasonably. Thus, the group consensus remains that a GPS-backed governor is not yet a reasonable design choice. If it's not reasonable, there's no negligence, and automakers would very, very much prefer to retain high maximum speeds because of point four. They'd rather just pay the victims.
Note that in the U.S. the Skyline GTR is limited to 156 mph and not GPS enabled. It's only in Japan, where all cars are limited to 112 mph, that the Skyline offers a GPS geofence option, and even there it only detects whether or not you're at a race track and removes the static limiter. Hardly robust technology.
However, Autopilot *can* be restricted reasonably, because:
- It's feasible. In fact, it's implemented already (Tesla already restricts the speed of Autosteer).
- There no safety issue with disabling Autopilot in cases where its performance is questionable. You still have full use of the car when under manual control.
Unlike high speed crashes, which are rare, there will soon be many, many cars on the road with an autopilot-like feature (thank you, MobileEye), so I think the net liability risk will soon grow to the point where any manufacturer who implements autonomous technology will try very hard to prevent it from being used when it shouldn't be. This may be one reason why other manufacturers have proceeded very cautiously with their autonomous rollouts.