Ideally the fees would be similar to the Norway model, where some tickets are tied to the income of the driver, in this case the pre-tax earnings of the company that created the driverless car.
If they were, then it makes sense to fine them to some multiple of the benefit they got from this advertising tactic, but as it is, I don't see why it should be different from anyone else's ticket. The company isn't likely to enjoy a flood of this administrative work, besides the cost of the actual fines, so they'll work to minimise them anyway
Noone sane would be willing to assume basically unlimited liability for someone else's software.
Maybe that's good thing - some work for humans after the robots take over, albeit as human legal shields ;)
If getting a ticket one ride in a thousand is cheaper than deploying another 2000 cars to make up for the increased trip time I’d expect them to keep getting tickets.
I’m also not sure they don’t do it on purpose. Tesla self driving has an aggressive mode willing to speed and roll through stop signs. Those were deliberate, law breaking, choices.
Seems foreign (heh) to me that a regulator would allow software to drive lethal machinery on public roads without checking that it at least stops at a stop sign. Fining them proportional to turnover makes a lot more sense suddenly. Or maybe a competent regulator, like, prevention rather than after the fact action
So the AV software is so unreliable that it can't adhere to speed limits?
A sibling comment mentioned that they did willfully build a variant that breaks laws btw. If there is apparently no regulator that needs to approve what makes it onto the road, I can understand a lot better why people are calling for insurmountable fines such that they have no choice but to remove that. Why not call for adequate approval mechanisms though, looking at other countries' examples where this problem doesn't exist... I dunno
If they become profitable you'd want to normalize by number of miles, unless you just want an incentive system to get more people on the road (extra drivers) and increase chance of humans suffering road injuries to boost employment in an internal service sector.
But even then coming out with a more efficient fleet than a competitor for higher margin would be penalized. You'd rather disincentivize skimping on safety for margin and not disincentivize better maintenance and fuel economy.
Fines should be scaled to income and the value of the vehicle and should exponentially increase for reoffense when in the same catagory of offense.