Can you sue a software update?
(Read Time: 3 Minutes) By Ollie Coull
Imagine sitting in the driver's seat of your brand-new, self-driving car. You are cruising down the motorway at 70 miles per hour while checking your emails. Suddenly, the car abruptly swerves off the road and crashes into a concrete barrier, causing severe injuries. You discover that a wireless, over-the-air software update pushed to your car by the manufacturer just thirty minutes earlier contained a glitch that corrupted the navigation sensors. When you sue the car company for product liability, their legal team responds with a shocking argument: the physical car worked perfectly, and software is legally just intangible information, not a physical product. Under traditional consumer law, you cannot sue a line of code for product liability.
To understand why a faulty software update creates a massive legal nightmare, you have to look at how tort law historically categorises products versus services. Under strict product liability rules, if a manufacturer sells a physical product with a manufacturing or design defect, they are automatically liable for any resulting harm. You do not even need to prove the company was careless; you only need to prove the product was unsafe. However, services and intangible items like books, software code, or computer programs have traditionally been excluded from strict product liability. If an error in an navigation map book causes you to take a wrong turn and crash, you cannot sue the book publisher under product liability. Courts have treated software under the same logic for decades.
This historical distinction was forged in landmark cases such as Donoghue v Stevenson, which established the modern law of negligence, and later codified in statutory regimes like the Consumer Protection Act 1987 in the UK. These laws were specifically written for physical items: exploding glass bottles, faulty brakes, or contaminated food. The legal chaos begins when software stops being a passive program on a screen and starts actively operating heavy machinery in the physical world. When a car, medical device, or industrial robot relies entirely on continuous cloud software updates to function safely, the boundary between a physical product and an intangible software service completely dissolves.
Courts across the globe are now being forced to adapt classic tort principles to this modern reality. In recent personal injury claims involving advanced driver-assistance systems, judges are increasingly rejecting tech industry attempts to hide behind software disclaimers. Lawyers are successfully arguing that when software is embedded into a physical machine to control its movement, the software and hardware merge into a single legal product. If an over-the-air update makes that machine unsafe, it is legally identical to a mechanic installing a defective physical part on your vehicle without your knowledge.
At the end of the day, tort law exists to ensure that companies cannot profit from dangerous innovations while shifting the human cost onto innocent consumers. If a corporation has the power to remotely alter how a vehicle behaves on public roads with a single line of code, they must carry the legal responsibility when that code fails. As autonomous technology takes over everyday life, the law is sending a clear message to the tech sector: if your code moves in the real world, it carries real-world liability.
References (APA 7) Consumer Protection Act 1987, c. 43 (UK). Donoghue v Stevenson, AC 562 (1932). Directive 85/374/EEC on Liability for Defective Products (EU).
