It will only take a few fatalities for the govt to stop any autonomous vehicles on public roadways unless it is in a safe geo-fenced area with clear liability.
The life threatening situations are rather simple and reactive. It's a car colliding with something at a high speed.
No deep planing or human level negotiations necessary. Well designed LiDAR cars will almost never be at fault of killing someone.
I was predicting [0] in Nov 2018 that a next self driving car fatality will occur with 50% chance before March 2020.
80% before March 2021. Well, self driving cars are safer than I expected back then.
And Tesla should get there too sooner or later.
Also, the govt approach is proving to be quite risk accepting.
Tesla already killed and injured many people when on autopilot.
[0] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/776/when-will-the-next-f...
"automated system saved my life"
and
"automated system didn't kill me"
Like, my own car has several features which I believe are enough to prevent 90% of accidents in urban settings. But I find it hard to interpret when someone says "autopilot saved my life" - like, you mean "autopilot didn't kill me"? Because if it merely stopped hitting something then I really don't understand how you can be certain that
1) you wouldn't have avoided the collision by yourself
2) you wouldn't have avoided the collision with exisitng systems without going full autopilot
And I have been in a Tesla(few actually) and I personally think that they way Tesla does it is the worst possible implementation - it gives you so much confidence that you really stop paying attention(even though you absolutely should never ever do that) only to spontantiously decide QUICK! HUMAN, TAKE OVER! in the middle of a turn.
Like, if I owned a Tesla I'm sure I'd love the autopilot, but I also think it's far too dangerous to be forming any kind of statements like "we'll have full self driving rollout by 2025-2028" based on it.
"saving your life" - never been in such a situation before except once in my life when I encountered a parked tractor trailer at the side of a country road in the middle of the night without any working lights.
I saw it when the high beams hit the rear reflectors and reflective number plate and I swerved out slightly without a major correction otherwise it would been a rollover.
Multiple times ????.