Hit by a Robotaxi — or Riding in One? Who Pays When the Car Has No Driver

May 11, 2026

Waymo is in Detroit. Zoox is testing in Ann Arbor. Tesla's Robotaxi network is rolling into more cities every quarter. When one of these hits you — or you're in the back seat when it crashes — the personal injury playbook changes.

There's No Driver. So Who's the Defendant?

In a traditional car accident, the at-fault driver is the starting point. Their insurance carrier writes the check. In an autonomous vehicle crash, that person doesn't exist. The 'driver' is software, written by a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, deployed by a fleet operator, riding on hardware built by yet another supplier.

Liability fans out across three or four entities: the fleet operator (Waymo, Zoox, Tesla), the vehicle manufacturer, the software developer if separate, and sometimes a third-party teleoperations or safety driver contractor. The right defendant depends on what failed and when.

Riding in a Robotaxi When It Crashes

If you're a passenger and your robotaxi gets in a wreck, you're in a strange spot. There's no 'driver of your vehicle' to sue. Most operators carry significant commercial liability policies — Waymo's is in the millions per occurrence — but accessing it means proving the autonomous system, the vehicle, or the operator was negligent.

Plan to get hit with mandatory arbitration clauses buried in the ride app's terms of service. Some are enforceable. Many aren't. We treat them as the opening move, not the final answer.

Hit By a Robotaxi as a Pedestrian, Cyclist, or Other Driver

This is the cleanest scenario, legally. You're not bound by any terms of service. The vehicle's commercial policy is in play. The discovery you get is unlike anything in a normal car accident: sensor logs, lidar point clouds, video from eight cameras, decision-tree logs from the autonomy stack.

That evidence cuts both ways. It can prove the system saw you and decided wrong — which is gold for your case. It can also prove you stepped off the curb against the light. Either way, the evidence exists, and we know how to get it preserved before the operator scrubs it.

Michigan No-Fault Still Applies — Sort Of

Michigan PIP covers you whether the at-fault vehicle had a human driver or not. Your medical bills, wage loss, and replacement services run through your no-fault carrier first. The third-party negligence case — the one that gets you pain and suffering and excess economic loss — is what runs against the AV company.

Where it gets messy: assigned-claims and uninsured-motorist treatment of autonomous fleets. Insurance commissioners are still writing the rules. We're tracking it closely.

Preserve Evidence Within 30 Days

Robotaxi data logs roll off. Some are retained for 30 days, some 90, a few longer if a 'safety event' was flagged. If you don't send a litigation hold letter to the operator within weeks, you may lose the recording of what their car was doing at the moment of impact.

We send preservation letters within 48 hours of being retained. It's one of the single biggest differences between a strong AV case and a weak one.

Call Big League if a Driverless Car Hit You

These cases are different. The evidence is different, the defendants are different, the playbook is different. If you've been hit by — or hurt in — an autonomous vehicle in Michigan, call us before you talk to anyone from the operator's claims team.

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