You can't blame the driver, they weren't driving. The car manufacturers can't accept blame, as it costs a lot if you have to factor in the cost of a lifetime of support for a maimed infant. Even ignoring the fact that it only works on highways and not normal surface roads, Tesla's "beta" Autopilot feature takes no responsibility because the driver is still supposed to be holding the wheel.
Also as any software developer would tell you, software updates would also be a problem in themselves. If you propose that cars be auto-updated automatically, I wonder how insurance would work when the car is running different software to the software it was originally insured with. Critical saftey systems can't get auto-updated without a lot of testing. What if the auto-update mechanism gets hacked, or maliciously changed by a disgruntled self-driving car employee? What if a legitimate update causes another bug where it maims the elderly now instead of infants? Do they roll back to the infant-maiming software now? I'm being silly but updates on critical safety stuff isn't so simple, especially with the legal ramifications.
I think legal issues will be a problem for self-driving cars, maybe even a larger problem than the actual designing a working self-driving car problem. Someone has to be responsible for inevitable accidents (bugs?). After a century of being able to blame the driver, car companies won't want to change that status quo.
Maybe insurance will decide that they'll cover self-driving cars if they prove themselves to be safe, but we'll see.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/06/people-want-self-driving-cars-...
(Not that auto-driven cars don't produce less accidents when other human-driven cars behave expectedly.)
But on real roads with questionable maintenance and other unpredictable cars on it, I just can't see it happening unless there's some major change to the roads infrastructure.
I associate self-driving Ubers with unicorns and flying carpets not because of self-driving car technology, but because of the total shift in business model for a future Uber.
Self driving cabs require, at a minimum:
- Owning or leasing capital assets (robot cars)
- Maintenance (from mechanical repair to removing puke and vandalism)
- Provide local infrastructure for them (real estate for storage, maintenance and charging)
- Own liability for all of the various mishaps that will naturally happen. (accidents, human-prompted mischief or criminal acts (Uber drive by shootings, prostitution, narcotics transport, etc)
Add to this, that each time a special case comes along, the software can be patched and it won't happen again. Something humans are terrible at - learning from others' mistakes.