The world’s biggest maker of sensors for self-driving cars has poured cold water on the chance of rapid growth for fully autonomous vehicles, saying society and regulators are not ready to accept deaths caused by machines that drive themselves.
“Close to one million people lose their lives every year to car accidents. If a technology company builds a vehicle that kills one person every year, that’s one-millionth of the difference, but it will have trouble to survive,” said Li in an interview."
I suspect the biggest obstacle to fully autonomous vehicles is the backlash against the unemployment they will cause. Safety will be used as an excuse to bolster that narrative. My guess is that by the 2030s, it will be clear to most people that they are far safer. They already are now, and they will be far more advanced then.
Top sensor maker Hesai warns world not ready for driverless cars
It's also the nature of the accidents. There are human-causes of accidents that we understand because we are human. We can punish irresponsible drivers more harshly than those who just had a freak accident.
Automated systems on the other hand will fail in completely unexpected non-human ways. We will look at the circumstances of a collision and say something like "it was completely clear [to a human] that the pedestrian was crossing the road, how could the car not see them?" and this will fuel a contempt of the automated car for being incompetent in ways which should disqualify it from driving, as an incompetent human would be, even if the car has a fraction of the accident rate.
We can drive defensively by predicting the mistakes or bad behaviours of other (human) drivers. But when there are drivers on the road that are completely unpredictable and make mistakes in unexpected ways, it makes all of us less safe, and less able to drive safely.