Partner at Charbonnet Law Firm LLC
Practice Areas: Car Accident, Slip & Fall Accidents
A car with driver-assist features does not announce that it is about to make a mistake. It just stops for a shadow on I-10, drifts at a pale lane line on Claiborne, or fails to register a pedestrian stepping off the curb. When that happens and someone is hurt, the question is not whether a robot is at fault in some abstract sense.
It is the same question any New Orleans car accident attorney asks after a wreck: who controlled the driving task, what failed, and what does the evidence show? Louisiana has no separate “AI law” that answers that for you.
It already has negligence, product liability, and a fault-based system for allocating blame among multiple parties.
This guide explains how those rules apply when an automated system is involved in a crash, who may be held responsible, and what evidence can be used to decide the case.
Nothing about the law starts from scratch. A crash involving an automated system is judged under the same negligence and product-liability rules that govern any Louisiana wreck, with one extra question layered on top: who or what was driving when it went wrong.
If a person is assumed to be watching, the fault can stay with them. If the system failed within its own design limits, responsibility may shift to the company that built or coded it.
So the technology does not erase accountability. It changes where you look for it. A driver who ignored repeated “hands on wheel” alerts is in a very different position than one whose car steered itself into a barrier without warning, and Louisiana law has room for both stories (and for a split between them).
More than one party, usually. Liability in an automated-vehicle crash is rarely a single name on a single line, and sorting out who is at fault when an automated feature fails often means looking past the driver entirely.
Depending on what the data shows, it can be shared among the human behind the wheel, the automaker, the software programmer, the fleet that owns the car, and even outside contributors like a poorly marked work zone. Louisiana’s fault rules are designed to apportion blame across all of them at once.
Here is how the roles tend to break down.
The person in the seat can be liable when they were supposed to monitor the system and did not. This is the common outcome in Level 2 vehicles, where the driver is expected to keep watching the road and take over the instant something looks off. Trusting the car too much is not a legal defense.
An automaker can be held accountable when a design or hardware problem causes a crash, such as a sensor suite that fails to detect a stopped vehicle or a braking system that activates for no reason. Tesla and other manufacturers have faced lawsuits on exactly these theories.
Sometimes the hardware isn’t the problem, but the software is. If a driving algorithm misunderstands a scene, or an over-the-air update causes unsafe behavior, the company that wrote or released that software may share the blame.
A company running automated vehicles, such as a rideshare or delivery fleet, may be liable if it skipped maintenance, ignored known defects, or kept a vehicle on the road after a recall warning.
Other factors could also have influenced the fault, such as missing lane markings, confusing construction zones, or bad mapping data that sends the car where it should not go.
“Every act whatever of man that causes damage to another obliges him by whose fault it happened to repair it.” — La. Civ. Code art. 2315
Under Louisiana’s comparative fault rule, a court assigns each responsible party a percentage of fault.
That is how one AI-related crash can leave the driver, the manufacturer, and a supplier each paying part of the damages.
The SAE automation level matters because it shows who was expected to drive. At lower levels, the driver still controls the vehicle and may be answerable if something goes wrong.
At higher levels, when the system is operating within its intended limits, blame may shift toward the technology and the company behind it.
The feature name does not decide the case, but it helps show who had the duty to act.
These systems can steer, brake, or accelerate, but they still require the driver to watch the road and stay ready to take over. Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” and similar packages sit here. The driver remains legally responsible, even when the system is actively running.
Higher-automation systems can handle the full driving task under set conditions. When a crash occurs while the system is properly engaged within its intended operational design domain, liability is more likely to fall on the manufacturer or developer.
Misusing a system (running it where it was never meant to run) tends to place the blame on the driver. A genuine system failure during proper use tends to land it on the company. Most crashes on Louisiana roads today involve Level 2 features, which is why “the car was driving” so rarely clears the person in the seat.
The federal government keeps a plain-language explainer of these levels. You can read the NHTSA overview of automated vehicle safety for the full breakdown.
Digital records, mostly. An automated-vehicle case rises or falls on data the cars themselves generate, far more than on a hand-drawn diagram or a witness’s best guess.
The event data recorder, the sensor logs, and the software history together tell a story about what the car saw, what it did, and whether a human touched the controls. That story is the case.
This data can be overwritten, deleted during a maintenance cycle, or locked away by a manufacturer’s legal team. Lost yet? The short version is that the proof in these cases has a shelf life, so preserving the vehicle and sending evidence-hold letters early can determine whether the truth is ever recoverable.
Through the Louisiana Products Liability Act. When a defect in the vehicle (not just driver error) causes a crash, the claim falls under the LPLA, which sets the exclusive theories for suing a manufacturer in this state.
A product has to be “unreasonably dangerous” in one of four defined ways, and the burden is on the injured person to prove it.
Under the Louisiana Products Liability Act (La. R.S. 9:2800.51 et seq.), the claim must show the product was unreasonably dangerous because of how it was made, how it was designed, an inadequate warning, or a failure to match an express warranty.
The defect must generally have existed when the vehicle left the manufacturer’s control.
“The manufacturer of a product shall be liable to a claimant for damage proximately caused by a characteristic of the product that renders the product unreasonably dangerous when such damage arose from a reasonably anticipated use of the product.” — La. R.S. 9:2800.54
Picture a crash where the automated system misses a pedestrian because of a design flaw, your damages are $200,000, and the evidence also shows you glanced at your phone.
A jury might assign 75% to the manufacturer and 25% to you. For a crash before January 1, 2026, you recover $150,000 (the award reduced by your 25% share).
For a crash on or after that date, you are under the 51% bar, so you still recover that $150,000, but had your share been 55%, you would recover nothing. The defect is identical in both versions.
The date and the fault split move the money. (Charbonnet Law Firm has recovered results of $200K, $240K, $275K, and $315K in personal-injury matters; past results do not guarantee a similar outcome, and each case is unique.)
Mostly, the laws that govern every other crash. Louisiana applies its general negligence and fault statutes to automated vehicles, layers product liability on top when a defect is involved, and defines “automated technology” in its motor vehicle code rather than creating a separate liability regime.
There is also a dedicated framework for autonomous commercial trucks, which is narrower than people assume.
Negligence flows from Civil Code article 2315. Fault allocation runs through article 2323. The deadline to sue is set by Article 3493.1, and our breakdown of Louisiana’s two-year filing deadline explains which version applies to your crash.
Those three do most of the work in a passenger-car AI case, the same as they would in an ordinary fender bender on Carrollton.
Louisiana’s autonomous-vehicle statute (La. R.S. 32:400.1 et seq.) governs autonomous commercial motor vehicles, broadly heavy trucks used in commerce, and requires features like the ability to reach a “minimal risk condition” after a system failure.
It does not turn an ordinary Tesla into a separately governed machine, so do not expect it to control a typical driver-assist crash.
Treat it like a serious crash first, and a technology case second. Get medical care even if you feel okay, because concussions and internal injuries can show up later.
Then protect the evidence. Take photos of the scene, save any dashcam footage, obtain witness names, and do not allow the vehicle to be repaired or sold until its data is preserved.
Report the crash, and be careful about recorded statements. The technology adds one wrinkle. Because the most important proof is digital and perishable, the gap between the crash and the first preservation letter can matter more here than in a standard case.
Our guide on documenting the accident scene covers the basics, and you can read up on dealing with the insurance adjuster before that first call comes.
| Potential defendant | When they may be liable | Typical proof |
| Driver / safety operator | Failed to supervise or take over (common in Level 2) | Driver-monitoring data, alerts, dashcam |
| Vehicle manufacturer | Design or hardware defect under the LPLA | EDR data, sensor logs, recall history |
| Software / AI developer | Faulty algorithm or unsafe update | Software version history, system logs |
| Fleet owner / operator | Poor maintenance, ignored recalls | Service records, internal warnings |
| Third party | Bad road markings, mapping, or construction | Scene photos, road-authority records |
It depends on who was controlling the driving task at the time of the accident. Fault can fall on the driver, the manufacturer, a software developer, a fleet operator, or several of them at once. Louisiana’s comparative fault rule (Civil Code article 2323) allows a court to assign each party a percentage rather than naming a single defendant.
Yes. Under the Louisiana Products Liability Act, a manufacturer can be liable if the vehicle was unreasonably dangerous in design, construction, warnings, or warranty, and that defect helped cause the crash. The injured person carries the burden of proving the defect existed when the vehicle left the manufacturer’s control.
No. Most systems on the road are Level 2 and require constant human supervision. The driver is expected to watch the road and take over immediately, so relying too heavily on the technology does not shift the blame off the person in the seat.
Event data recorder logs, sensor data from cameras, radar, and lidar, software version history, and driver-monitoring records. Together, they show what the car detected, what it did, and whether a human intervened. Because this data can be overwritten, preserving the vehicle early is important.
Two years from the date of injury for crashes on or after July 1, 2024, under Civil Code article 3493.1. Crashes before that date fall under the older one-year deadline. Product-liability claims against a manufacturer are subject to the same prescriptive period.
Mostly no. Louisiana applies its existing negligence and product-liability rules to AI crashes. It has defined “automated technology” in the motor-vehicle code and specifically regulates autonomous commercial trucks, but a typical driver-assist crash is decided under the same statutes as any other wreck.
A crash involving driver-assist or self-driving features is harder to untangle than an ordinary wreck, and the evidence that proves it can disappear while you are still in treatment. The fault rules changed in 2026, and the deadline to file suit is two years for the most recent crashes, so waiting rarely helps your side.
At Charbonnet Law Firm, our attorneys have represented injured people across New Orleans for three generations, and consultations are free. If an automated system was part of your crash, talk it through early, while the data can still be preserved and the deadline is still open. Call us at (504) 888-2227 to walk through what happened and your options.
With over 50 years of legal experience serving families in the New Orleans area and surrounding Louisiana communities, our firm takes pride in providing clients with personalized legal services tailored to individual needs.
