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This was the easy part.

The hard part will be fighting the technophobes when somebody drives into the side of one of these and kills themselves. I don't envy being in that battle.

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I would bet they can reconstruct the entire environment through their LIDAR records, play by play, and show the events leading up to the collision.

I hadn't even thought of that. I wonder how this will effect the car insurance industry.

I don't think this will be a problem because we're likely to see a gradual move towards fully self-driven cars where humans still drive but the computer takes over only when needed to avoid accidents. Volvo already has a system that stops you rear-ending other vehicles and BMW has a system that safely pulls the car over if the driver suddenly gets incapacitated. Eventually the most advanced cars will never cause an accident while still being human-driven. From there the leap to let go of the wheel is not that big and I think it will be reasonably easy.

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