Quick Answer
In Kentucky, the person in the driver’s seat. A car with lane centering, adaptive cruise control and automatic braking is not a self driving car in the eyes of Kentucky law, and the statute is explicit about it. Under KRS 186.760(4), a fully autonomous vehicle means a motor vehicle equipped with an automated driving system designed to function without a human driver as a level 4 or 5 system under SAE J3016, and under KRS 186.760(5) a human driver is a natural person in the vehicle with a valid license who controls all or part of the dynamic driving task. Assistance features leave the person in the seat controlling part of that task, so the person is still the driver. On top of that, KRS 189.290(1) requires the operator of any vehicle upon a highway to operate it in a careful manner with regard for the safety and convenience of pedestrians and other vehicles, and nothing in that duty is switched off by a feature name. Research also shows these systems make drivers measurably less attentive over time, which is the opposite of what a safety feature is supposed to do.
No Matter How High Tech Your Vehicle, You Must Pay Attention to Driving
Technology can make driving safer, but that depends on whether you use it properly and pay attention to its limitations. Putting too much faith in it can endanger yourself, your passengers and everyone around you. It is also worth being clear about the vocabulary before going further, because it gets used loosely and the looseness is dangerous.
The SAE levels people quote are an engineering taxonomy published by SAE International, not a body of law. Kentucky refers to it in KRS 186.760(10), which identifies SAE J3016 as the taxonomy and definitions for terms related to driving automation systems for on-road motor vehicles published on June 15, 2018, as amended. But Kentucky uses it for exactly one purpose, which is to define what counts as a fully autonomous vehicle in KRS 186.760(4). A system that sits below that threshold has no separate legal status in Kentucky at all. There is no statutory category of partly responsible driver. There is a driver, and there are duties that attach to being one.
The Good News
One category of driver assistance really does prevent crashes, and it is the one that intervenes rather than the one that steers for you. IIHS research by Jessica Cicchino originally found that automatic emergency braking reduced rear end crashes by about 40 percent and forward collision warning alone by 23 percent. After the study was updated with data from an additional automaker and another year of crash data in several states, the figures rose: automatic emergency braking reduced rear end crashes by 50 percent and rear end crashes causing injury by 56 percent, while forward collision warning alone reduced them by 27 percent and 20 percent. So the common claim that automatic braking cuts rear end crashes roughly in half is supported.
Automatic braking is also on its way to becoming required equipment, which tells you it is not required yet. In a final rule published at 89 Federal Register 39686 on May 9, 2024, NHTSA established Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 127, Docket No. NHTSA-2023-0021, requiring automatic emergency braking including pedestrian automatic emergency braking on light vehicles, meaning all passenger cars and all multipurpose passenger vehicles, trucks and buses with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 pounds or less. The rule took effect on July 8, 2024, and the compliance date is September 1, 2029, with an extra year for small volume manufacturers, final stage manufacturers and alterers. Until then, whether the car beside you on the Bluegrass Parkway can stop itself is a matter of what its manufacturer chose to fit.
The Not-So-Good News
The features that take over steering are a different story, and the research on them is uncomfortable. Working with the MIT AgeLab, IIHS gave a 2020 Tesla Model 3 to 14 people who had never used any partial automation system and followed them for a month. Over just over 12,000 miles with the system engaged, the vehicle produced 3,858 attention related alerts. Roughly 1,900 were initial reminders, 72 were escalated warnings and 16 were lockouts. IIHS reported that many of these drivers learned the timing of the attention reminder well enough to stop it escalating, and some used that skill to keep doing something other than driving, interrupted by a quick nudge of the wheel to silence the system. At the time the system judged attention through a steering wheel torque sensor alone.
The companion study makes clear this is not one brand’s problem. Ten drivers spent a month with a Volvo S90 equipped with adaptive cruise control and Pilot Assist. When they first got the cars there was little or no difference in signs of disengagement between driving manually, using cruise control and using lane centering. After a month, on figures IIHS recoded and recalculated after finding coding errors in its own video review, those drivers were more than three times as likely to show signs of disengagement and seventeen times as likely to take both hands off the wheel, and compared with driving manually they were more than twelve times as likely to have both hands off the wheel once they were used to the lane centering.
Read that pattern carefully, because it is the whole argument. The problem is not that drivers ignore these systems from day one. It is that the systems train them. A monitoring method that can be satisfied by touching the wheel teaches a driver that touching the wheel is what attention means, and after a month of that the driver’s eyes are somewhere else. If a crash happens in that state, the driver was not paying attention, and no research finding changes who owed the duty.
What Kentucky Law Says About the Driver Behind the Wheel
Kentucky states the driver’s duty in a statute rather than leaving it to a jury’s sense of things. KRS 189.290(1) requires the operator of any vehicle upon a highway to operate the vehicle in a careful manner, with regard for the safety and convenience of pedestrians and other vehicles upon the highway. KRS 189.290(4) goes further and prohibits operating any vehicle in a reckless or negligent manner so as to endanger persons or property in or near a highway or a highway work zone, and under KRS 189.290(5) a violation of subsection (3) or (4) also exposes the operator to revocation of their license under KRS 186.560. That section was amended by 2024 Ky. Acts ch. 198 and its current text took effect on July 15, 2024.
If the distraction involved a phone, Kentucky has a second statute directly on it, and its exceptions matter as much as its prohibition. Under KRS 189.292(2), no person operating a motor vehicle in motion on the traveled portion of a roadway may write, send or read text based communication using a personal communication device to communicate manually with any person, including a text message, instant message or electronic mail. KRS 189.292(1) defines a personal communication device broadly as a device capable of two way audio or text communication that emits an audible signal, vibrates, displays a message or otherwise delivers communication to the possessor, including a cellular telephone. KRS 189.292(3) then excludes the use of a global positioning feature, the use of a navigation system integrated into the vehicle, reading or entering a number or name to place a call, an emergency or public safety operator when the device is essential to official duties, and texting to report illegal activity, summon medical help, summon law enforcement or prevent injury to a person or property. Its current text took effect on June 8, 2011.
The link between a broken traffic statute and money for an injured person is KRS 446.070, which provides that a person injured by the violation of any statute may recover from the offender such damages as he sustained by reason of the violation, although a penalty or forfeiture is also imposed. So a citation is not just a citation. It is a route to civil recovery.
Where a driver assistance system genuinely failed, a claim may also run against the manufacturer, but Kentucky puts real obstacles in front of it and it is better to know them at the start. Under KRS 411.320(3), if the plaintiff failed to exercise ordinary care in the circumstances in using the product and that failure was a substantial cause of the occurrence, the defendant is not liable whether or not the defendant was at fault and whether or not the product was defective. That is a complete bar, not a reduction, and against a driver who stopped watching the road it is the first defense a manufacturer will raise. Under KRS 411.310(1), the product is also presumed not defective once the injury occurred more than five years after the sale to the first consumer or more than eight years after manufacture. A claim against a manufacturer is worth investigating. It is not a substitute for looking honestly at the driver.
Fault then gets divided rather than dumped on one party. Kentucky’s comparative fault doctrine comes from decisions of the Kentucky Supreme Court, while the machinery is statutory: under KRS 411.182(1) and (2) the fact finder assigns a percentage of the total fault to each party, weighing both the nature of the conduct and how closely it is connected to the damages, and under KRS 411.182(3) the judgment states each party’s equitable share, so each pays its own share and no more. And the deadline is the motor vehicle deadline: under KRS 304.39-230(6) the action must be commenced not later than two years after the injury or the death, or after the date of issuance of the last basic or added reparation payment, whichever occurs later.
The Lesson to Be Learned
Drivers have not been replaced yet. No matter what technology your vehicle has, you must be actively engaged while driving, or you defeat the safety benefit you paid for. Technology has not evolved to let you safely surf the web, eat breakfast, nap, read or stream a series behind the wheel, and the vocabulary on the window sticker does not change that. Failing to remain vigilant while driving can be negligence, and under KRS 189.290(1) it can also be a violation of a Kentucky statute, which makes you liable for the injuries you cause in a vehicle crash.
The mirror image is worth stating too, because it is why people read a page like this one. If a driver who was using one of these systems hit you, the fact that the car was steering itself is not a defense they get to keep. They were the driver. The duty was theirs.
You Were Paying Attention. The Other Driver Was Not.
The most common thing insurers say after a crash involving one of these systems is that the technology was engaged, as though that answered the question of responsibility. It does not. Under Kentucky law the licensed person in the seat who controls any part of the driving task is the driver, and the duty in KRS 189.290(1) is theirs. Call us today for an evaluation.
