Insurance solved that problem, both by eliminating the possibility of a catastrophic financial loss, and by creating a buffer between me and all those lawyers.
I predict that insurance will solve the lawyer problem for self-driving cars as well. At some point, it will cost me $5,000 a year to drive my own car, and $500 to let it do all the driving.
And on top of all that, if my car drives itself into an accident, the lawyers will talk to my insurance company, not to me. I see the insurance companies as the enabler for this tech. And they will want to enable it, it will put them in control of the market.
Indeed we can which is why some cities on the planet have gone carless and more and more opposition is mounting in the face of traffic deaths, pollution and so so on. Even in the US, maybe the most car dominated country in the world, there is a political revival of talks about high speed rail and alternative forms of transportation.
The other important difference being that the step from having no cars at all to having cars was one of the largest leaps in mobility in human history. Self-driving cars are nice, but not that much of a leap, and they have much more ambiguous implications when it comes to the job-market. They will face significantly larger hurdles with significantly less payoff in sight.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life...
However, I think the profit incentives of the trucking industry will manage to carve out some regulatory exceptions; something like “freight trucks can self-drive between 11a and 5a on these specific Nebraska highways, with warning signs on both roads and vehicles”. This sort of lobbying will be the thin end of the wedge for both iterating the tech, and normalizing its acceptance.
With a self driving car you know exactly what happened in an accident as video and telemetry is recorded. This is a tremendous advantage over having to reconstruct it without this data.
On the contrary I expect legislation forcing every car to include telemetry like the Chinese are forcing every car to be connected.
This accident's data is evidence, not opinion, not a belief, not a prejudice.
The usefulness of this has already been proven with airplanes.
I mean, sure, you can come up with some scenario where the liability exceeded the insurance coverage, but I haven't heard of many of those. Anyway, it comes from somewhere. If bankruptcy protects drivers, it also exposes them to the risk that they will suffer damage that isn't compensated.
Regardless, expecting a legal loophole to preserve the status quo indefinitely seems quite unrealistic and inherently unstable. If that actually holds up something that could massively benefit society (both economically and in saving lives), we simply legislate liability limits.
Liability you can incur while driving is almost arbitrarily high. Individual drivers rely on the existence of bankruptcy protection to cover these rare scenarios, or simply don't think about or plan for this at all.
> but I haven't heard of many of those.
How many do you think it takes to put a self driving car manufacturer out of business?
I'm not saying the status quo is a great situation, or that this is a good or bad argument for or against self driving cars. Only that it's a description of the current situation, and why legal issues might be a much bigger problem for self driving car manufacturers than individual drivers.
It's a different type of potential error and a much more scary one. I can mitigate human drivers as a pedestrian by taking care walking, but I cannot mitigate an AI that thinks my shirt makes me look invisible due to its learning being deceived by a pattern.
I'm not sure why people even embrace self-driving cars. By now we know that centralization, lack of maintenance, and fragmentation in software are serious risks, as well as how software can increase the attack vector on people as well as provide benefit. I'm not sure if the risks are worth the modest efficiency increase, and this isn't even getting into existential risks like external parties being able to control when you drive, or attacks on the networks or technology.