> However, most of these accidents are rear end collisions --- naturally blamed on the human driver.
Rear end accidents are practically always the fault of the person who didn't stop in time. If someone rear ends a driverless car, even if it stopped because of some glitch, that driver is at fault. They shouldn't be driving around city streets with such speeds and limited following distance that they couldn't stop in time.
Exactly. The car in front might be reacting to some road hazard that just appeared that is not visible from behind it or it may have some mechanical failure. It doesn't matter why it comes to a stop, it is always and all times the responsibility of the trailing car to maintain enough distance to be able to come to a complete stop given the speed and road conditions.
It’s easy to say that but you can’t just ignore the reality that this is how people drive, and self driving cars in that environment do lead to more crashes.
I'd argue we should bar people from driving who collide with stopped vehicles without any other extenuating circumstances. Maybe adding self-driving cars to the mix will increase these collisions for a few years, but if we bar people from driving for doing these kinds of accidents we'll quickly weed out these massively unsafe drivers from the driving population and be much safer overall. Maybe we'll finally start decreasing the pedestrian fatality rate instead of increasing it.
If you refuse to drive safely you have no place to be on the road. We shouldn't just accept people driving in massively unsafe fashion.
I wouldn't mind this but it's completely politically unfeasible. There is absolutely no chance of political support for banning people from driving for anything other than a DUI. Even "accidentally" killing people or being so old that you can't see enjoys wide support of still being allowed to drive. As long as that is true self driving cars need to be able to handle bad drivers.
Rear end accidents are practically always the fault of the person who didn't stop in time. If someone rear ends a driverless car, even if it stopped because of some glitch, that driver is at fault. They shouldn't be driving around city streets with such speeds and limited following distance that they couldn't stop in time.