The advances in automotive technology within the last three to five years have been staggering. I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing what cars my kids will be driving, or not, as is the case here!
Highlights:
-Cars that don't crash due to human error would save 40,000 lives and a million injuries (NIH). Mostly young people, for whom car accidents are the leading cause of death among major categories.
-Not crashing would save 230 billion dollars of accident cost (NTSB). About 2-3% of GDP.
-Not driving would free up 50 billion hours (or 1 trillion dollars) of people's time. Around 8% of GDP.
-Electric cars (more feasible when the car can go to a service station when it's not being used, because one of the major problems with electric cars is that storing lots of energy in a battery is difficult) would save 50 billion gallons of imported gasoline, replaced with the equivalent of 5 billion "gallons" of domestic-source power plant fuel. Thus eliminating about 12-15% of the USA's CO2 emissions and nastier pollution.
-There would be a serious reduction in the urban land devoted to the ~600 million parking spaces, estimated to be up to 10% of urban land in many cities.
Let's say I've created a robo car system that is 100x less likely to be involved in an at-fault accident. If everyone installed the system nationwide, I would be assuming about 2.3 billion dollars (1% of the accident cost figure quoted above) in liability.
However, that's not likely to happen since the first time such a system fails and crashes it would be horrible publicity that would put me out of business.
"[Robocars may first be adopted in] other countries, such as China, Singapore, India or Japan. These high-tech countries have very different liability systems, and indeed very different forms of lawmaking that can simply wipe away the liability problem with the wave of a pen."
(But there will always be a need to get your hands dirty if automotive construction and modification are your thing.)
So when they do break the headaches are much bigger.