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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

I predict that in 2031 no major car company will offer self driving technology (besides emergency auto breaking) in personal cars. Even Tesla will stop offering what it has now. Reason: too many lawsuits.

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In 2031, fully self driving cars will be just as imminent as they are now :-)

this. There was a thread an Ask HN around the new decade with predictions for 2030 and I wrote this too.

I don't think so. Lawsuits do not determine the long term future; Economics i.e. the bottom line money does.

By 2031 most new cars will have lane keeping, emergency braking, traffic light & sign sensing. And likely more. Almost all cars will drive hands-off steering wheel on the highways. By 2031 a big proportion of new cars will be electric.

Not a lawyer, but couldn’t you make people sign a waiver before activating the feature?

How do you make a third-party pedestrian to sign the waiver?

Pedestrian would have the claim against the car driver surely, the car driver would be unable to blame the "autopilot", just like they can't blame cruise control today.

You don't. The waiver between the ownee and manufacturer specifies that the owner is liable. Beyond that point, insurance solves the issue. Currently, the driver is liable and is required by law to carry liability insurance, so there is not much change from the consumer perspective. From the insurer perspective, the relevent data point us how often self driving cars mess up compared to human driven ones.

This is a good point that introduces more complexity into the problem. Whether or not AI driving flourishes can be determined by more than regulations or manufacturers themselves. If insurance companies decide from their risk calculations that insuring cars with an auto-pilot is too much risk and therefore refuse to insure them, that could also kill self-driving cars.

by bumping into them?

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