Thing missing from the discussion is the different safety and threat
model fully autonomous cars have compared to human drivers.
Mass incidents are one of them.
* If one autonomous cars fails catastrophically on some road, all other cars with same model and/or software are likely to do the same. Huge pileup in fast tragic can become nightmare for the car maker/operator.
* If there is a software error in the overnight update or planned sabotage, hundreds of thousands of cars can get into accidents in very short time period until the failure is noticed.
* Simple loss of trust due to security incident, discovery of exploit, server configuration error, hacking in the network can lead to security groundings of millions of cars at once. If all Toyota's are grounded for a week, the economic impact around the world is huge.
Even if the autonomous driving works, designing the security and safety infrastructure that keeps them working will be real challenge. I'm sure it will be worked out but it's not going to happen in few years.
Mass incidents are one of them.
* If one autonomous cars fails catastrophically on some road, all other cars with same model and/or software are likely to do the same. Huge pileup in fast tragic can become nightmare for the car maker/operator.
* If there is a software error in the overnight update or planned sabotage, hundreds of thousands of cars can get into accidents in very short time period until the failure is noticed.
* Simple loss of trust due to security incident, discovery of exploit, server configuration error, hacking in the network can lead to security groundings of millions of cars at once. If all Toyota's are grounded for a week, the economic impact around the world is huge.
Even if the autonomous driving works, designing the security and safety infrastructure that keeps them working will be real challenge. I'm sure it will be worked out but it's not going to happen in few years.