Self-Driving Cars Regulation in Colombia

For more information concerning the importance and urgency of regulation for autonomous vehicles see: Beale (2018), p. 223; Anderson et al. (2016), p. 134.

The Court stated that “the progress of ideas today revalue the ancient dogma that there is no liability without proven fault” (1938b).

A dangerous activity occurs “when a person, in order to carry out a task, adds to his strength a “strange” one, which, by increasing his strength, breaks the balance that previously existed with the associates and places them “in imminent danger of being injured,” even though the task “is carried out by observing all the diligence that it demands” (CSJ 1976).

In a 1992 ruling, the Supreme Court made an excerpt from several previous rulings in which the concept of a keeper of dangerous activity had been defined in the following terms: “In summary, the concept of “keeper” of the activity shall be of the individual or legal entity that, at the time of the accident, has effective and independent power of direction, governance, or control over the instrument that generates the damage, whether or not it is the owner, and provided that, by virtue of some factual circumstance, it is not prevented from exercising that power”. To the point Santos Ballesteros specifies: “there are also numerous cases of persons who, despite having the thing, are not responsible for it, such as those in charge who have in their possession a thing that their principal has given to them for the exercise of their functions and other persons who cannot behave independently in relation to the thing that has been given to them. An example of the latter situation is that of a person who uses a thing with the owner’s authorization when the owner reserves the power of command, direction and control over the thing, that of the ‘load’ in the same circumstance” (1996).

The distinction of the two classes of dangerousness arose as a result of certain cases in which the courts found that there were people responsible for the potential danger of the structure of certain things, and others who were responsible for the handling or use of them. Therefore, in order to find the true culprit, it was necessary to determine which danger was the cause of the damage (Velásquez Posada 2015).

See case law guidelines in: CSJ. exp. 5012 of 1999.