Crashed prod? Straight to jail.
It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time. We don't jail aircraft engineers when they make a mistake because just sending people to jail doesn't work as well as encouraging them to co-operate ex post facto so the root cause can be identified.
Poe's law strikes again. Of course nobody thinks crashing prod should result in jail, or most software engineers would have spent some time behind bars by now. However it's entirely unclear whether @CountHackulus meant "of course autonomous car engineers should be jailed, just as if an engineer signed off on faulty plans" (which to be fair, also happens), or is just repeating my joke with bridges.
You'd be surprised at how many intelligent people really do want this.
When we start taking idiot drivers' licenses away, sure. Otherwise this is a silly overreaction with a calculable cost in human lives.
But the company itself should be given a citation for the majority of ordinary traffic violations, and should be the one fined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...
https://apnews.com/article/robot-germany-sexual-assault-colo...
Can you extend that to this situation?
And cops do sometimes want a higher performance police cruiser than average in case a runaway speeder needs to be apprehended.
Probably going to eventually need an autonomous one of these for some police departments:
https://gmauthority.com/blog/2026/09/california-highway-patr...
No driver needed but you still need to have a Robocop inside to get out and write the citation :)
In the old days this kind of thing was often referred to as a "police interceptor".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW8-1SYvDTI
If the violation is serious enough the autonomous predatory tow trucks will hear it on the radio then show up promptly to whisk the vehicle away, as usual. Plus in this case the driver is detained and the vehicle is impounded in the same stroke :)
After that it would only be fair that they would have to not only pay bail to the court, but also towing & storage fees before being released, like for any normal driver.
And if they skip bail, they're going back in the slammer :0