Than number of car crashes is not the same in all countries,states or regions so I would hate that a safe city will be less safe in the future because of this.
I really really doubt that! The car manufacturers will fight tooth and nail to be seen as the company providing the safest cars
If every company has their own secret suite of test cases then different companies can specialize in different aspects of safety, and different AIs will be tuned to watch for different conditions.
Imagine if instead of that they all worked together to define a rigorous test suite. Then they would all be striving to excel against all of the tests that the best of them could come up with. Wouldn't that result in more rigorous testing than any individual company would do? Especially if the results of all of the tests were public?
To go another step further, imagine an open carAI platform that had the aforementioned test suite and a full simulation platform for testing changes, with different car manufacturers represented on a committee that oversees the carAI platform. Separate the smarts from the base car a bit and have some sort of abstraction layer between the smart bits and the car bits. As long as the abstraction layer is configured properly then different AIs would be interchangeable/upgradeable on the same base hardware. All car companies (and tech companies, and interested individuals) could collaborate on building the best, most efficient, safest car AI possible. People on older hardware would get all the same safety improvements as people on newer hardware (though hardware improvements would obviously improve things like sensor quality and quantity and the like), there wouldn't be fragmentation between ai ecosystems with poorer people trapped on older releases with lower safety standards while the rich get the latests and greatest and safest cars, etc.
Obviously competition is better than nothing, but is it really better than an open, collaborative alternative?
Maybe making the component open source would be the best for the citizens.
We seen competition not working in many sectors, like ISPs is US, operating systems for desktops or mobile phones...
IF the self driving component in the car could be swapped so you can buy say Tesla but get the self driving package from BMW or from Google then that could help competition, but without this if all companies have a similar failure rate then they can concentrate on competing on marketing,horse power, price, efficiency and not adding some extra safety, at least until some important person or a big number or children get killed by a very stupid issue like a car hit a wall because it did not see it because it got confused by some drawings on the wall.
Agreed!
I don't think car manufacturers is one of those sectors. Even if you take into account the periodic scandals (emission test, having to recall cars because they were literally killing people[0], etc) that pop up, cars have gotten massively safer over the past 50 years
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...
((hey, wait a minute. Doesn't that mean we already have a legal framework for cars killing people?))