[3beard]

It's night and your driverless car is waiting in front of a red light. Suddenly you see a man with a shotgun walking up to your vehicle. How do you tell your driverless car to ignore the red light and get the hell out of there?

[1123581321]

We already put ourselves in situations like that when we take mass transportation, sit in rooms with one exit, enter retail stores, and so on.

Also, consider that with enough driverless cars, the congestion at intersections should be reduced (many lights will no longer be needed, especially during low-traffic times like night.) The danger at congested stops would be equal to now, and it is nearly impossible to drive away from danger in a multi-lane column of stopped traffic.

[toyg]

That scenario is incredibly unlikely in the UK, but even then, you could have an emergency-call mechanism that could take control of the car remotely.

[ta_8UgB54G]

The entire point of driverless cars is that the software of the car is superior to the wetware of the human. Humans cannot be trusted to determine what the car does, directly, under any circumstances, even an emergency.

So the answer is, you don't. The sort of fine-grained, always on surveillance necessary for driverless cars to work would be applied outside the cars as well as inside. Pedestrians are dangerous, with or without a gun, and as soon as you walk outside and attempt to interact with the urban environment without the safety of a self-driving car, someone would be alerted. Your identity will be confirmed, you will be tracked and every self-driving car for miles will know about it.

So in your scenario, the proper authorities have been called before you were even aware of his presence, simply because there was a human near traffic.

[evgen]

Since this will never happen, while the thousands of deaths per year due to driver error is a reality, who cares?

[newaccountfool]

considering in the uk the deaths caused by dangerous driving is 0.04% is it worth making everyone change to driverless cars? What happens if I want to drive my old reliable ford escort MK2? Do I not get to any more?

[evgen]

Yes, it is worth it. Initially we will provide tax rebates to driverless cars to encourage people to transition, then we add a "you are an anti-social luddite" tax to manual drive cars, then we make the latter illegal on public roads.

If you want to drive you old reliable fold escort you are free to do so on your own property, this has the added bonus that you can drive it as fast and as dangerously as you want (barring negligence regarding passengers or bystanders.) Once you enter the public thoroughfare we fine you and if the offense is egregious or leads to injury to others we put you in jail. Same response we give to someone who wants to drive 200kph.