[torpcoms]

You would rather have a self driving car in an undefined state, rather than having it shut down? A random glitch could be just as bad as an exploit; if some chunk of memory gets overwritten and your car decides that the brick wall doesn't actually exist any more, I don't think whether it was an an exploit or not really matters. The occupants end up injured either way.

[pgeorgi]

The undefined state might be in the GPU driver handling the heads-up display, or maybe in the sound subsystem. No need to shut down the system at the kernel level for that. Report the issue to the userland, so that it can decide whether to initiate a safe halt at the sidewalk or emergency lane.

After telling the kernel to shut down immediately you don't have that option any longer.