It’s that pillsbury dough boy spaceship from Austin Powers disguised with rock

I never really understood how the industry was able to ensure, from a legal standpoint, the failsafeness of autonomous cars. There are bound to be errors, such as the incident last year with running over a homeless woman who was clearly visible to a real eye, but not detected.

It’s simply impossible to account for all the corner cases, especially when you have to factor in manual drivers who can behave arbitrarily (what if they purposely drive weird just to mess with the autonomous cars?).

In fact, autonomous cars may increase danger rates as human drivers become quite peeved at sharing the road with them, and try to derail them at all cost.

Maybe these are the reasons they gave up.

> what if they purposely drive weird just to mess with the autonomous cars?

I got a car about 6 months ago with Level 2 Autonomy and I'd say it's even more than just trying to mess with them. Now that I know the subtleties of how my car behaves, it's easy to spot other drivers who have theirs engaged too. I can use that to my advantage when appropriate and it takes some ethics not to abuse them. For example, if I have to merge I'll merge in front of one of those cars, purely from a safety standpoint -- I know that car is going to respond and give itself lots of space. Of course, people could use that much more maliciously to take advantage of those cars "niceness".

I've never had anyone mess with my car just for the sake of it, but you can see the seasoned Tesla owners taking the opportunities that they spot. It changes the way other drivers drive if they can identify the behavior.

It’s a game theory thing. Companies send out a “please write a review for us “ in the first week and you feel like it’s some kind of prisoners dilemma. It’s particularly apt for small companies who welcome in only a couple employees at a time.

I’d also argue it has to do with such availability of previously undesirable areas in coastal regions which are also close enough to large commerce centers. Everyone wants to live on coastline. It’s the reason why amazon can’t just relocate to North Dakota and start a second Silicon Valley there