The individual operator (the driver, or the person in the operator seat who presses the "engage autonomous mode" on the car) is the one who chose to buy a vehicle and put it on the road, potentially endangering other people. We need to be responsible for our own actions and the situations we create.
Is their a gun shop owner liable for murder (and/or wrongful death) every time someone is killed with a firearm? What about the clerks at the gun store? Or the truck driver who delivered the firearm to the store? All of their respective actions clearly created a situation where people have died; your position is silly.
You are assigning blame further up the chain, which I am not doing. I stated in my first post that I do believe the manufacturer is liable for their faulty products, but can not be SOLELY responsible. I might find the gun shop owner for selling a faulty or damaged gun, for example if there was a recall and they ignored it.
If you bought a faulty gun with a broken safety catch, and waved it around in a crowded street, and it fired, killing someone, you should be held personally liable. You brought the gun out in public and created the scenario which caused someone to be hurt by it.
What if the ammunition was faulty, and a case of it blew up in someones car killing a pedestrian next to it? Or a gas leak in the fuel line that dripped onto a faulty underground electric cable, igniting and causing injury?
I don't know what the threshold is in other countries, but Canada has a vague but useful threshold: "knew or ought to have known". A different way it's been stated in the courts is "what a reasonably prudent person ought to have known"
Looking at the fuel line question through that lens: did the leak start while you were driving and you were completely unaware? Or has it been leaking for a while and you just haven't gotten around to fixing it.
With the ammunition, how was it stored? Was it dumped in a toolbox filled with pointy screws? (A reasonably prudent person ought to know that ammunition is fired by striking the primer with a sharp object). Was it stored in the front seat of the car on the hottest day of summer? (A reasonably prudent person would expect it to get really hot in there)
Etc. Etc. The thing about negligence is that there's a lot of room for interpretation. As another example, if you've been driving a car around with self-driving features, and you've experienced it behaving erratically multiple times, and that's followed by an accident... you knew or ought to have known that it was dangerous to be on the road in that vehicle. If there was an OTA update for the autopilot last night that installed silently, and it results in a crash, then it's probably the manufacturer who's liable.
