Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away
"regulators may also choose to prevent some of the worst drivers from getting the behing the wheel."
This in spades. As soon as a computer can approximately match a half-decent human driver most humans will let them do it - which is a good thing because a half decent computer will stay half decent all the time. vs even a good human spectacularly losing concentration at least once every 5 minutes.
It actually takes a pretty bad series of errors to cause a crash (not all of them made by the driver - roading "designers" are frequently unqualified utter numpties, particularly in places like the UK where road speed limits and layouts on major roads are not signed off by qualified engineers but by local politicians operating on a knee-jerk response - and such numpties frequently engage in victim-blaming instead of sorting out shitty designs that kill people.)
Insurance actuaries are going to be the deciding factor. It's been known for 60 years that drivers who travel substantially slower than the herd have a significantly higher crash incident and claim rate(*) than the norm whilst those who travel substantially faster than the herd have a higher per-claim level(**). People who drive too slow when they have black boxes fitted may well be putting their premiums UP...
As soon as robocars can show statistically lower crash rates in various scenarios(***) I can see premiums for manual control skyrocketing and/or insurance companies insisting on enhanced driving training before they offer coverage at all - whilst much higher standards of driving competence will eventually be demanded by regulators simply because robots will set the minimum level to be reached..
(*) The 2 most common insurance claim categories are "backed into another car whilst parking" and "my parked car was damaged by a hit and run driver" - usually in parking lots. Going slower doesn't make up for poor spatial judgement, rotten eyesight, etc. The next few categories involve changing lanes into another vehicle without checking or low speed scraping walls, poles, curbs etc.
(**) higher speeds == higher crash energies == bigger mess.
(***) Particularly highways/urban/suburban highways. There will always be situations where the robots can't cope but the response without an advanced driving certificate is likely to be to either allow manual driving at a low speed or to switch to a remote handler - and you can pretty much guarantee that cloud learning will be applied. Whilst Uber spectacularly fucked up their programming with assumptions based on politically motivated traffic laws (instead of safety-rooted ones), Google's done quite well at hazard anticipation and handling (particularly pedestrians and other items on the roadway)