It's not entirely irrational - One driver suddenly goes crazy -> One car crash. Broken software update for thousands of self driving cars -> hundreds of crashes.
That can already happen. Modern cars have fewer mechanical linkages than you might think.
There are solutions to your proposed problem. You could require the car be taken into a shop for updates. This would make the update gradual (so the eggs are never all in one basket) and it would let mechanics ensure the update was applied correctly. You could also design the software to have a core that is never updated. It would monitor basic things like "Am I going too fast?" "Can I brake in time for any obstacles?" etc. Google uses this strategy IIRC.
>Modern cars have fewer mechanical linkages than you might think.
Even better, the more software and chips there are in your car the "better" the bugs get. Friends of mine had fun problems with a new Audi A5: about 10 times, it randomly turned off while driving taking about 20 seconds to come back, and handling a car with power-steering with the engine off is very hard! AFAIK, that problem hasn't been solved yet.
At least in Germany though, steering and braking have to be mechanically connected which maybe limits innovation in that area a bit (or reduces incidents where you cannot control your car anymore).
Yes, but auto-pilots are easier problems to solve, due to predictability.
It boils down to maintaining speed and bearing, while considering some other factors such as weather, terrain and collision prevention with other planes (transponder based?).
In case of a truly unpredictable event, the pilot takes over.
Cars on the other hand need to do much more than that.
The process of automatically determining where the road actually is, is not trivial by itself.
Cars also need to handle other unpredictable factors to a much higher degree; other manually driven cars, bicycles, pedestrians to name a few.
Not to mention road obstacles, and animals (in my country moose collisions are common, and deadly).
> Not to mention road obstacles, and animals (in my country moose collisions are common, and deadly).
It always fascinates me that this argument comes up from the negative side of self-driving cars pretty much every time, but it's actually the poster-child reason self-driving cars are better.
A self-driving car is at least as likely to recognize a potential collision with a moose as a human is (given current sensor tech) and probably much more so since it can't be distracted.
The advantage of a full omnidirectional sensor array is that it can pay attention to the kid on the bike, the moose crossing the street, the 5 cars around you, the alien spaceship in the sky, and the kid using your bumper to accelerate his skateboard all at once (or at least in timeslices small enough to count as such). You can only pay attention to a couple of those things.
No, don't get me wrong.
I am all for better sensors, drivers assist systems, or self-driving cars. I'm just pointing out that self-driving cars are probably more complex than air plane auto-pilots.
