1. Air bags sometimes kill people who would otherwise have survived in an accident, but on balance they save lives.
2. Making air bags mandatory hasn't caused manufacturers of cars or of air bags to go bankrupt.
3. If self-driving cars cause deaths, but on balance save lives, the situation is directly analogous.
4. There will be a way to make self-driving cars work. Q.E.D.
I seem to remember that laws exist to grant immunity to manufacturers of airbags, at least if they were functioning properly. A quick Google finds lots of ambulance-chasers who talk about "defective airbags," so manufacturers aren't immune to liability if they screwed up.
Similarly, you could imagine that No Fault laws could be passed for self-driving cars that were operating within reasonable parameters. A gross error on the part of a self-driving car could still leave manufacturers liable, but as history has shown, car companies are willing to write off even gross negligence claims rather than voluntarily add safety devices to cars, calculating cost-to-fix vs cost-to-pay-off-family tradeoffs. [1]
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that, any company that doesn't offer self-driving cars in the next 15 years may as well plan to shut down or be acquired. This is going to be a must-have feature. They will figure out how to make it work for manufacturers.
The liability question will be solved. They wouldn't even let car companies go bankrupt when they (arguably) deserved to; they certainly won't let them get into a situation that kills them, and as others have rightfully pointed out, the numbers aren't even that prohibitive if they needed to self-insure.
That is a very poor analogy. Airbags have only killed a few hundred people and in many of those cases the manufacturer was still not liable because of human error (victim was not wearing a seatbelt, was a child improperly seated in the front, etc.)
The manufacturer liability exposure for fully autonomous driving is literally several orders of magnitude greater than for airbags.
> quick Google finds lots of ambulance-chasers who talk about "defective airbags,"
That is the Takata airbag case - they manufactured defective airbag with malfunctioning ammonium nitrate inflators which exploded supersonically instead of inflating, killing 8 people. They were fined $200m just recently and have to recall and replace 400,000 airbags.
This case might actually be analogous to self-driving car issues - it was a case of a defect potentially caused through negligence in engineering, rather than airbags working as intended.
2. Making air bags mandatory hasn't caused manufacturers of cars or of air bags to go bankrupt.
3. If self-driving cars cause deaths, but on balance save lives, the situation is directly analogous.
4. There will be a way to make self-driving cars work. Q.E.D.
I seem to remember that laws exist to grant immunity to manufacturers of airbags, at least if they were functioning properly. A quick Google finds lots of ambulance-chasers who talk about "defective airbags," so manufacturers aren't immune to liability if they screwed up.
Similarly, you could imagine that No Fault laws could be passed for self-driving cars that were operating within reasonable parameters. A gross error on the part of a self-driving car could still leave manufacturers liable, but as history has shown, car companies are willing to write off even gross negligence claims rather than voluntarily add safety devices to cars, calculating cost-to-fix vs cost-to-pay-off-family tradeoffs. [1]
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that, any company that doesn't offer self-driving cars in the next 15 years may as well plan to shut down or be acquired. This is going to be a must-have feature. They will figure out how to make it work for manufacturers.
The liability question will be solved. They wouldn't even let car companies go bankrupt when they (arguably) deserved to; they certainly won't let them get into a situation that kills them, and as others have rightfully pointed out, the numbers aren't even that prohibitive if they needed to self-insure.
[1] http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1...