Nah, you don't need to ban anything. Just force the rule, that if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system.
If you charged car makers $20m per pedestrian killed by their cars regardless of fault you'd probably see much safer designs.
This is an extremely optimistic view on how companies work
A big reason car companies don't worry much about killing pedestrians at the moment is it costs them ~$0.
About half our road fatalities are pedestrians. About 80% of those are intoxicated with alcohol. When you're driving at 40mph, at night, and some drunk guy chooses to cross the road, no amount of safety features or liabilities can save him.
Sure, cars can be safer for light collisions with pedestrians where the car is going slowly. Especially in the US where half the cars have a very high hood. But where I live the problem is not safer cars, it's drunk pedestrians.
Here in the UK we have a standard 30mph built up area limit, dropping to 20mph in most residential area.
Result - a massive reduction in serious injuries and fatalities, especially in car - pedestrians collisions.
And sometimes at places that aren’t even a cross walk.
Im in DTLA frequently and I am almost even developing a secondary instinct to cover my brake and have an extra look around when a Waymo stops in a street.
Because it may be dropping off or picking up a rider or it saw something or someone I didn’t. Just happened Saturday in fact. I saw it do an abrupt stop when I was yielding to it at a “T” intersection and expected it to have the right of way and keep going. I didn’t proceed until I could figure out WHY it had just stopped, like “okay WHERE’S the passenger”
and then five or so people started running across the street in front of it that I would not have seen if that Waymo wasn’t there and I was clear to turn left.
As an added bonus it stayed stopped after they all crossed and I decided to be a jerk and turn left in front of it. It stayed stopped for me too. There’s no driver in it. It ain’t mad. XD
I have a good eye for spotting uber drivers who are about to load or unload too, Especially if they have some common sense and are trying to line up to do that so their passenger can get on or off curbside. A Waymo is just.. way more immediately identifiable that I can react that much faster to it or just be like.. alright. I’ll take a cue from it, it’s usually right.
And hell even if it’s wrong, maybe this isn’t a good time to pull out in front of it anyway!
Whoever was in control. This isn’t some weird legal quagmire anymore, these cars are on the road.
And will continue to be until every municipality implements laws about it.
It’s not a conundrum as much as an implementation detail. We’ve decided to hold Waymo accountable. We’re just ticking the boxes around doing that (none of which involve confusion around Waymo being responsible).
The nature of the punishment does not necessarily follow the same rules as for human incompetence, e.g. if the error occurs due to some surprising combination of circumstances that no reasonable tester would have thought to test, which I can't really give an example of because anything I can think of is absolutely something a reasonable tester would have thought to test, but for the sake of talking about it without taking this too seriously consider if a celebrity is crossing a road while a large poster of their own face is right behind them.
Don't get me wrong, perfection should be the long term goal. However I will settle for less than perfection today so long as it is better.
Though better is itself hard to figure out - drunk (or otherwise impaired drivers) are a significant factor in car deaths, as is bad weather when self driving currently doesn't operate at all. Statistics do need to make sure self driving cars are better than non-impaired drivers in all situations where humans driver before they can claim better. (I know some data is collected, but so far I haven't seen any independent analysis. The potentially biased analysis looks good though - but again it is missing all weather conditions)
The benefits of self-driving should be inrefutable before requiring it. At least x10 better than human drivers.
Right now… Tesla likes to show off stats that suggest accidents go down while their software is active, but then we see videos like this, and go "no sane human would ever do this", and it does not make people feel comfortable with the tech: https://electrek.co/2025/05/23/tesla-full-self-driving-veers...
Every single way the human vision system fails, if an AI also makes that mistake, it won't get blamed for it. If it solves every single one of those perception errors we're vulnerable to (what colour is that dress, is that a duck or a rabbit, is that an old woman close up facing us or a young woman from a distance looking away from us, etc.) but also brings in a few new failure modes we don't have, it won't get trusted.
This is basically what we have (for reasonable definitions of full).