Oh god there's going to be so many crashes... at first. Then it will catch up to EA's racing AI and become the first casualty in the war against skynet.

If there are too many crashes it will give people a negative view of self driving cars. Perhaps Google will enter an ultra safe team that always avoids crashes but maybe never wins unless everyone else crashes out.

The spread of self driving vehicles (and even drones) is probably an 'accelerating returns' of some sort. Such context will act as a beautiful test bed for complex and limit cases. Unless the results end up locked it will backfire positively on in-society driving.

I would love to see a rule where the software that each team uses has to be open-sourced at the end of the season, both to ensure competitive parity between well funded and not-so-well-funded teams, and also to ensure that any breakthroughs spread quickly from the world of racing to the world of "normal" cars.

It would be interesting to have a stock car version with software open before the race. Teams could try exploits, interfere with GPS, drive evasively, etc. - arguably this will lead to greater hardening techniques, ability to cope with crashes of all types.