Airbags do kill people. Literally. Many die because of airbag deployment, and without airbag many would have walked away alive. Sure, airbags save many more lives than they take away. But point is, societies figured out how to deal with problem and airbag manufacturers do not face exorbitant lawsuit just because tech is not perfect and someone(including children) got killed here or there.
Actually, they did. The fact that the government had mandated airbags meant the government ended up paying out.
They then changed the airbag design, but I still know people who got the kill switches for good reason.
Point is, self driving tech do not had to be perfect to be mass deployed. It just had to save lives on average.
This is dead wrong; the psychology of this is quite well understood because of the history of fully automated trains and airplanes. It has to be about 100 times better.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it, but *automated trains have worked perfectly since the 1970s* and we still can't get them deployed anywhere with grade crossings! There's a psychological demand among most people to have a driver driving the car.
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And I will also bet you that certain designated freeways will be converted first to having an "automated vehicle only" lane, then two, then eventually the entire freeway.
Now, that's much more likely. I can certainly see automated driving in a freeway-only role (no grade crossing), or in a urban-center-below-20-mph role (nobody minds too much if there's a collision).... just not in the intermediate role of fast rural roads and fast semi-rural roads.
Which is the only important one, frankly. Private cars are fundamentally impractical in big cities due to congestion. Urban freeways are an inefficient and impractical construction which is barely affordable, and will at best become an exotic toll-road scheme for the rich. Basically, cars are best for rural areas. And that's where automated cars are so far behind that they won't be ready in 50 years.
And since automated cars won't be mandated on those roads... Google *will* be hit with *enormous* penalties the first time they kill someone by running automated on a rural road.
Our grandchildren, if they survive global warming, will know exactly what "driving a car" means. Even if only the farmers actually do it.
Musk is a very smart man, and he isn't expecting fully automated cars. He's figured out what you can implement without triggering the "OH GOD ROBOT CARS ARE KILLING US ALL" reaction -- while keeping a 'responsible' driver in the driver's seat.
One possible scenario is for anti-collision technology to be mandated; so that drivers are still driving the car, but if they do a maneuver which puts them at risk of colliding, their car will simply refuse to respond. "No, you can't follow the guy in front of you that closely. No, you are not permitted to swerve into that tree." This would be a vast improvement in safety without triggering the 'automatic killer robot car' reaction.
