[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.