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Comment by SapphireSun | Hacker News Reader

"Automakers would have to submit safety assessment reports to regulators, but the bill would not require pre-market approval of advanced vehicle technologies. The measure now goes to the Senate, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers has been working on similar legislation."

You and I both know that without premarket approval, one or more companies are going to get careless and are going to kill people before the technology is ready. It's going to stain public acceptance for a quite necessary technology.

Here's a new medicine we're developing! It's gonna totally work great. The science says it's possible, we just need to work out the kinks while treating hundreds of thousands of people....

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Even with government approval, there will be fatal accidents. This approach is better because it DIRECTLY holds automakers liable-- they can't claim immunity because some bureaucrat approved the vehicle. And it keeps politics and technical ignorance out of the development cycle.

Also, 3,000 people die every month on U.S. roads, your medicine analogy is wrong because there is much harm from the current system.

One issue is this.

Assume self-driving cars exist at some point. Assume they reduce fatalities by 90 percent. Ignore injuries. Now "only" 3,000 people are being killed by autonomous vehicles because "Hey, software isn't perfect and stuff happens." How many consumer products today kill that many people a year and the public is basically OK with it?

I'm not saying that the companies shouldn't make reasonable payments as a cost of doing business but if Ford manufacturing defects today were to kill 1,000 people a year they'd be sued out of existence.

There are plenty of medical procedures that save lots of lives but occasionally kill people. The public is ok with that because it is way better than the alternative.

Medicine generally is the closest analog. On the other hand when someone dies because of a rare drug side effect, lawsuits are common. There's a reason why the drug companies are protected from liability in the case of common vaccines [and that medical malpractice insurance is so expensive].

Except in this case, someone else's bad medicine can kill you.

Yes but usually those medical procedures prove that they save more people than they kill before they're given to the public. Self-driving cars have not done that.

I dunno, a financially disinterested third party that appoints an expert panel of inspectors could stop a poor decision from being made. Most of the time, the internal processes within these companies will work correctly.

What can happen is if suddenly there's a race to market that throws process off the rails or a risk factor that was dismissed because of particulars of the culture that is producing the vehicles. That's where an outside inspector and premarket approval really helps.

The incentives against killing people are already in place.

Tell that to the Radium Girls. :P

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