It is the people who want to expand general surveillance who would like to blur the distinction between that and accident investigation, in a bogus attempt to justify the former, and I don't think we should go along with it.

I eat popcorn watching the double-think these days. Laws simply weren't designed for perfect enforcement. We need a new legal framework that can handle omnipresence.

Many penalties have been scaled to compensate for the expected likelihood of getting caught (so as to keep the expected value of the crime negative.) Even without the radical overhaul it sounds like you're suggesting, we'll definitely have to update at least a few things.

Have they? My impression was that legislatures almost never reduced penalties outside of hotbutton political issues.

Are we even in the ballpark of being able to collect real time video (and other sensor data) from tens of millions of vehicles?

That's a completely different technical problem than having the vehicle store some period of data.

I guess authoritarians will push to have the ability to install monitoring programs locally.

You can use ML to summarize the video and you can store the most interesting bits in low quality - instead of actual video you can just store something like "red car crossed intersection going northbound, male with blue cap stopped at light, ..."

Youtube can record that amount of video just fine.

MobilEye is doing just that to create their HD maps and train their models so, yes.

Tens of millions of vehicles all at once?