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When people are actually put in danger, the historical response is that the entire fleet gets suspended / pulled off the roads (on top of the making headlines and triggering investigation stuff). 2018 Uber, 2023 Cruise, 2025 Zoox cases.

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That will not be a viable response for very long. Will it affect the entire fleet in one market or the entire fleet worldwide? How long will it affect the fleet? When robotaxis are an integral part of a local economy, then the incentives diminish for taking them entirely offline. The three instances you mention are fleets under testing circumstances and not commercial service, so there's a distinction!

Sooner or later we'll be making so many omelettes that the occasional broken egg will be, reluctantly, accepted, and the penalties will amount to the usual corporate wrist-slapping, and that will be that.

That’s a good point - I’d naively thought of it as “self driving gets way better than humans -> self driving ‘goes to prod’”, but there is a real possibility that regulatory scrutiny falls off too early, or worse, the lack of incentives results in backsliding on safety after regulatory scrutiny is off.

Rollouts seem conservative enough for the former, but the latter…

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