I'm walking down a busy road with traffic passing me at ~30mph at the moment. Anecdotally, the last 4 cars have had one person in the car who has either been texting on a mobile phone, applying makeup, eating breakfast, and playing with the radio. Do you think the reaction time of the guy who's texting his boss saying he's late would be faster or slower than the driverless car that was in a long garbage collection, if I were to step in front of him?
You do have a point on liability, and I don't have an answer better than a centralised pool of money that everyone pays in or out of.
7 people died in the challenger disaster. 30,000 people die each year in car related fatalities. Completely different order of magnitude.
Additionally, going up on a rocket is a fundamentally risking proposition done by adults.
Having a driverless vehicle that glitches, applies power instead of brakes, and kills a bunch of pretty young girls.... well that makes the 5 oclock news and 11 oclock for many, many days.
How many criminal charges were filed against individual engineers for any those 30,000 fatalities last year? How many were convicted? None and none.
You're illustrating my point for me quite nicely. Frankly, I can't think of a criminal conviction, even at the corporate level, for design flaws in the auto industry without going all the way back to the Ford Pinto.
You do have a point on liability, and I don't have an answer better than a centralised pool of money that everyone pays in or out of.