Your fear is very much grounded in reality. US lawmakers tend to be very reactionary, except in rare cases like gun laws. So it won't take much to have restrictions imposed like this. Granted, I believe some regulation is good; after all the reason today's cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn't because the free market decided so, but because of regulation. But self driving cars are so new and our lawmakers are by and large so ignorant, that I wouldn't trust them to create good regulation from the get go.
They're still very reactionary in that, which is precisely why it isn't very effective when a subset of them do react: there are plenty of smart things that could get proposed, but the overlap between people who know what they're talking about and people that want the laws is exceptionally small, so consequently dumb, ineffective stuff that has no chance of passing anyway gets proposed. What does get proposed is a knee-jerk reaction to what just happened, and rarely actually looks systemically at the current laws and gun violence as a whole. Example: the Las Vegas shooting prompted a lot of talk of bump stock bans. Bump stocks are so rarely used at all, nevermind in violence, and they will generally ruin guns that weren't originally made to be fully-automatic very quickly if they're actually used for sustained automatic fire. Silly point to focus on suddenly. After the Florida shooting last month so much focused on why rifles are easier to obtain than handguns. And it's because overwhemingly most gun violence is handguns. Easily concealable rifles are already heavily regulated at the federal level for that very reason.
<off-topic> This is non-sense. Typical semi-auto are wayyy over build. Unless mechanical wear or explicit tempering of the disconnector, there is no risk whatsoever to fire thousands of rounds with a bump stock. Actually, plastic/wood furniture are more likely to burn/melt before the mechanical parts will actually fail. As worst, you might bend a gas piston, but the rifle will otherwise be fine.
The underlying reasoning behind the push against the bump stock ban is that it was basically a semi-auto ban, as you can trivially with a bit of training bump fire any semi-auto without a bump stock from either the shoulder or the hip with a mere finger. </off-topi>
Tubes on low- to mid- range civilian DE guns can burn out very quickly, and are in fact designed to do so long before you get damage to the more expensive parts of the gun - I've seen it happen in most of the cases (which are admittedly quite few in number despite how often I'm there) where I've seen someone using a bump stock at a range. In the most recent case I think the guy was on his 3rd mag and it ruptured. It was a M&P 15 Sport II, if I recall. Not a cheap no-name brand, but about as low-cost as you can get and missing all the upgrades in the version they market to cops. High-end ARs would fair better, I'd expect, but high-end ARs are again so rarely used for actual violence because they're usually only purchased by people shooting for a serious hobby in stable life situations. And honestly I feel the same people buying those probably feel bump stocks are tacky and gaudy like I do.
Even in the most liberal interpretation of the proposed law, I don't think any bump stock ban would become a semi-auto ban. I could see the vague language getting applied to after-market triggers, especially ones like Franklin Armory, but you've gotta have some added device for any of the proposals I've seen to even remotely apply.
It's amazing how reformers get demonized even after their platform is accepted wholesale by the rest of the world.
And for a good reason, they are constitutionally prohibited to .
All safety functionality was introduced and used way before regulators even knew that it's possible.
Edit: please explain the downvotes, ideally with examples
In Black Mirror, all cars in the world will simultaneously swerve into nearby pedestrians, buildings, or other cars.
Scary stuff. I hope these self-driving cars will be able and designed to work while completely offline, with no built-in way to ever connect to a network. But given the biggest player in the field seems to be Google, they'll probably be always connected in order to send data to the mothership and receive ads to show you.
Don't hold your breath about that. There will be a huge load of data ready to be sold to advertising companies just by listening what passengers talk about when passing near areas/stores/billboards/events etc.
I'm just envisioning a scenario where the car automatically pulls to the side of the highway, locks the doors and dishes you with a 15 second ad, and then the doors unlock and the journey resumes as normal.
Are you working on the next season of Black Mirror?
In all seriousness, my fear (and maybe not fear, maybe it's happy expectation in light of the nightmare scenarios) is that if a couple of the "weird and terrifying" accidents happen, the gov't would shut down self-driving car usage immediately.