[ufmace]

I'm guessing that a big part of that is the combination of the potential for huge damages, and how big and public Google already is. One nasty accident followed by an ugly, drawn-out lawsuit could cause huge financial and PR damage to them. On the other hand, if you're a small start-up with no reputation to protect and not much capital to lose/go after, then worst case, you don't lose anything more than what's already been put into the single-purpose business.

[notahacker]

I'm not convinced lawmakers won't be convinced to go after individual company executives for reckless endangerment, negligence, manslaughter or whatever else they can dream up.

Especially if, Ford Pinto style, they've publicly stated that [for financial/reputational reasons] they shouldn't be as concerned about safety as another market participant, or that they should should aim to be "only just" better than fallible human drivers who frequently are held accountable for their fallibility.

I wouldn't want to be on the design team of a robotic car the first time it hits a child, even if the child acted in a reckless and unpredictable way that even a human mind would have been unlikely to anticipate and the software had demonstrated a far superior safety record to human drivers overall.

[pjc50]

Drivers are rarely punished more than trivially for their fallibility; even gross negligence gets quite a big pass.

The model case is probably the ongoing Toyota "unintended acceleration" case, in which it appears that poor software engineering really did contribute to fatal accidents. It's likely to cost Toyota a lot but not reach through to the design team.

[Houshalter]

What if it's initially deployed in another country with more reasonable regulators? I'm not sure such a place exists, but I don't see why it has to be in the US.

[sharemywin]

you might be able to get some help from the big companies though because they wouldn't want the industry to go teh wrong direction.

[HeyImAlex]

Worst case for you maybe, but it could set back the industry pretty significantly.

[ufmace]

Could be that the big, ugly lawsuit won't happen at all if there isn't a huge company like Google behind it to pay out any losses.

In any case, all of this will happen eventually. We will have robot cars on the road eventually, and eventually one of them will get into some sort of accident with big publicity potential. Any company involved in the industry probably ought to be managing what happens to them when that happens.