Not that long 'til somebody points a projector at the ground in front of a Tesla and it crosses into oncoming traffic. You could even mount that projector on a panel van, and use image recognition to target Teslas and otherwise stay inactive
I don't understand why people come up with all these ridiculous "what if" ideas against autonomous cars as if it's anything new.
It's already exceedingly easy to foul up a human driver. Stand next to a freeway and hold up a stop sign. Drop a foam mannequin from a bridge over the road. Paint some bogus lane lines. Shine a laser at their face.
Any of the above will cause accidents with humans, and you'll be arrested and charged with a felony. Deliberate attempts to compromise autonomous car systems carrying humans inside should be treated no differently.
The panel van (or drone) attack is highly targeted, and doesn't stick around like paint does.
These aren't just "ridiculous what ifs," they're a rather plausible method for freshly unemployed Luddites.
Sure, leading a self-driving car astray is more of an accomplishment than blinding a human, but comparing crimes by how entertaining they are to a bored unemployed DIY sociopath does not seem very reasonable to me.
Sure, your chances of getting into an accident while driving your own car are higher, and some dummy could throw a turkey onto your windshield and kill you ...etc, but humans don't think in probabilities (well, outside of Hacker News humans), and while driving their on car humans have an illusion of control, when the car is driving itself and you are sleeping, that control is gone.
Have you ever flown in a plane before? Some people are more nervous than others about giving up control but billions of people still do it because the benefits vastly outweigh slight anxiousness about that billion to one chance. People will not want to drive in an autonomous vehicle right up until they see they can give up their $40k car and hail a driverless taxi to go anywhere for pennies on the dollar.
With planes I think most people realize that the trained pilot is a better pilot than they are, so they feel more at ease giving up control to someone that is better than them. People just need to see that similarly, software drives cars better than humans.
Seem simple to handle, as the car computer see an image, it checks if the image show up in a second scan. Since the computer scans are very fast they should not effect to computer processing/reacting to driving the car.