http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magent...

We have a law that airbags have to accommodate unbelted passengers: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/35/6/1

Now sure, a passenger can be different than the driver but it's the same philosophy.

The amount of illegal maneuvers I see every day on my commute is astonishing - not using blinkers, intruding on cross walks, not moving over for emergency vehicles, following too closely, etc. It doesn't help that the only traffic law enforcement is really around speeding / running red lights / DUIs.

The problem with autonomous cars isn't the autonomous cars - it's accommodating non-autonomous actors. It only takes one google car hitting an old lady who's chasing a duck on the street to become CNN breaking news for the next 3 months a la that airliner that disappeared.

Probably quite a good part of the $hundred of millions price of a passenger plane is the autopilot (even 1% means $1M). And even at $1M/plane, 99% of a plane's autopilot works because it assumes that the current plane is the only one in a large vicinity of a point in space. This is assured by a centralized third party (control tower) that is not really automated but a very stressful human job (that's why the air traffic controllers are well paid). This is not the case with cars - in this case, most of the work being done is having each of the individual cars detect, with complex but not very good sensors and software, what is around them, in a swarm of other moving objects that do not communicate.

Electric power assisted steering. Few cars on the road currently are correctly termed steer-by-wire. Actually, only the properly-optioned Infiniti Q50 comes to mind.

You can still break when the ECU does something stupid. You can still break if you loose vacuum (engine not running), it's "just" more harder to do so.

Lane departure warning and collision warning systems are pretty prevalent. And even autobraking collision avoidance systems are getting pretty widespread.