Have fun with that! You won't find me in one of those.
If the car runs down a pedestrian in a crosswalk while said pedestrian has the right of way, on whom, exactly, does the civil liability fall? The manufacturer, or me, the occupant. Even more importantly, on whom does the criminal liability fall?
If the answers to those questions are not spelled out, explicitly, in the regulations congress puts out, then I agree, it would be hard for me to get into one of those things.
Especially if they said you were at fault because you told the car, "Take me home", or something. I can hear it now, "Your honor, the occupant was obviously exercising control over the vehicle!"
It may fail in practice, but the claim is all that should matter in court.
Yet, I'm sure somebody somewhere is going to be thrown into the lions for protecting some rich company. So I'm certainly not going to be one of the first to buy one.
I don't think so (never heard of) but I might be wrong.
I can imagine that they would be very complex to create.
Later in the pub he told someone who worked at BAE, and was fairly high up, and the guy said, "yes, I heard about that, you need to contact them."
He did, and he got the full "men in black" treatment with several interviews/interrogations to determine exactly who he was and what his intentions were, and threatened with jail time. Eventually they believed his story and he even got his drone back, although the camera was obviously missing.
Apparently it had landed next to something "extremely sensitive", which may or may not have been the cause of it drifting off in the first place.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/infiniti-q50-steer-by-wire/
Observing how these things are usually handled I would say the liability would fall on no one. Unless the driver is intoxicated car crashes, even those resulting in deaths, are treated as unavoidable accidents with charges rarely being filed.
When a cab maims a pedestrian in NYC the typical response is the NYPD releasing a list of pedestrian safety tips.
The downside to this is that these vehicles would likely make even the most cautious myopic octogenarian look like speed racer.
However, if the manufacturers are smart, they'll make the self-driving hardware record video footage they can use to defend themselves in court. You wouldn't want people to be able to jump in front of a moving car to try to get a payday after they get hit. This already happens and is why many people have dash cams. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibjWz9ehrJ8 for some good example.
What bothers me most about this tech is we have a pretty long history of auto manufacturers knowing about problems involving safety issues that they evaluate with a cost/benefit methodology as opposed to a safety first and always approach.
The Ford Pinto [1] is a good example of that.
I still trust me more than an autonomous machine but I do look forward to a day when I don't.
Have you ever been at the Las Vegas airport at the start of CES? I’ve waited an hour in line for a taxi. Of course they should have built the metro to the airport.
If you commute by train, this type of car would be perfect to get you to and from the station, especially if it could drive itself back home during the day.
An elevator can go up or down and has inertia brakes among other safety mechanisms. Most of these mechanisms are regulated and inspected and can not be disabled by software. I have watched videos of elevators behaving badly, but it takes a comedy of errors and many inept people for this to be a thing.
An autonomous car on the other hand, can do anything a car can do and anything that the buggy or compromised software tells it to do. I will not be victim to the first angst filled 12 year old that is abused by his/her parents daily, or by some burnt out developer, or a serial number typo in an assassination attempt. The serial number of my car could be one digit off from some politician or spy.
By all means, have fun in these things. Nobody will convince me to use one of these cars. Not now, not five hundred years from now.
You sound like someone who would have said you would never ride in a carriage that didn't have a horse.
The user isn't against the horse-less carriage out of fear, he's against the horse-less carriage because the option to control the horse has also been removed.
"jstaney you are under arrest - remain calm your vehicle will deliver you to the nearest processing facility. Do not attempt to control the vehicle. Do not attempt to exit the vehicle. Any action deemed as attempting to exit the vehicle or prevent it from arriving at the detention facility will result in your immediate admission of guilt and the appropriate sentencing will commence. Have a nice day, thank you for using GovCloud Services."
Similarly, we could easily have mobile phones that do not track us. It's just in none of the manufacturers' interest to design them, as the vanishing epsilon of people who care enough to pay extra do not offset the economies of scale from going with the current surveillance-based designs.
Having said that, one of the themes in discussion of mass surveillance is the quantitative difference of it being easier than a police department having to expend the effort of physically following someone around. Government (de jure or de facto) controlled cars will make the act of arresting someone similarly effortless.
Historically, it seems not to matter. The advancements in technology let societies that adopt them support a much higher population level. Those societies then go and kill off or enslave everyone who didn't adopt the new technologies, once a few generations have passed, their military supremacy is obvious, and there's enough cultural distance to view the adherents of the old technology as savage, subhuman primitives.
...which they stole from Jaguar.
Oddly enough, Mercedes has gone to column shifters in the last few years, which have previously been associated with American trucks.