I’m certainly not the first one to say that completely autonomous cars, while certainly amazing in their own right and brilliant in their engineering, are most definitely not going to start their takeover of the world quite yet. And there’s a force that will slow them massively. Lawyers.

This has somewhat to do with the scenario presented a couple of months ago by everyone’s favorite cranky middle-aged presenter about autonomous vehicles having to make ethical decisions and perhaps deciding they’ll off you. But that shouldn’t be much of a problem if the programming and encryption of their code is on the same level as it is on cars available on the market today. They’ll very happily swerve and run into some innocent women, children and their pets in an effort to save themselves. No, the problem is when the families of the run-over women and children decide they’ve had just about enough distress and they’ll sue. Who will they sue? Obviously not the people inside it, you can’t call them “drivers” can you? The manufacturers and the dealerships will have to spend tremendous amounts of money to cover their collective rear end. In the end the masses of outraged people will go ahead and decide that *something* must be done.

From here on it goes one of two ways, either a) It ends up in a stalemate or b) the NHTSA picks up on it and decides to try and do something about it. And by something I mean the logical solution of forcing manufacturers to once again fit controls for the drivers in case of an accident. Even if they don’t actually take control in the event of the crash at least there’s someone to blame.

Alright I may have taken a few liberties on my specific scenario. For one it’s hardly likely or even possible that the current level of programming and security is still the norm when autonomous vehicles become widespread. For the moment it’s required that there be at least a driver and a passenger in the vehicle while it’s undergoing testing and laws against distracted driving still apply. And that’s ignoring my big assumption that nobody will see this coming and just make autonomous cars normal cars that have the option to drive themselves instead of some absurd vision of a greenhouse on wheels with some furniture.

In fact why am *I* worrying about? Autonomous cars simply wouldn’t work here. You’d have to pretty much keep the auto mode disabled unless you never want to get anywhere because your autonomobile keeps letting people cut in line because it isn’t programmed to take the offense or you want to crash into a field because there wasn’t any signs telling the car that the street goes left and the GPS system hasn’t quite figured out where the road actually goes. According to Wiki A 2013 survey of 1,500 consumers across 10 countries by Cisco Systems found a full 57% “stated they would be likely to ride in a car controlled entirely by technology that does not require a human driver”, with Brazil, India and China the most willing to trust autonomous technology. What do all of those countries have in common? Their streets are absolute chaos. Meanwhile, the same studies say that in Japan, where things are much more orderly and people commit seppuku if they fail to keep lane discipline [citation needed], the percentage is much lower. Why would we need it? Everyone seems to be doing pretty well at this “driving” thing. And of course the top countries are places where the roads are very poorly lit/poorly marked/plain poor. Not precisely the place where autonomous cars would thrive.
Of course there’s also a fault on this theory. Russia isn’t on top three on this study, it only managed fifth place. And if any country on earth needs autonomous cars so their owners can go back to the important things (read: their vodka), it’s them.