[caligatrux]

Actually, I’ll bet that insurance companies will take the opposite tack; making it very expensive to drive instead of rely on the car. Properly programmed the occasional fatal error is still going to be much less death and carnage than the massive number of incompetent fools that make up the majority of drivers. Others may disagree, but I’ll put my investment money where my beliefs are.

Yes, the insurance companies will be in favor of this, because it brings in another huge source of money that will benefit them in two ways. First, they will have another set of "deep pockets" to go after for money if there is a wreck -- the driverless car system creators, makers, programmers, installers, maintainers, etc. Second, all of those companies/industries will need an increasing amount of insurance, which will grow the insurance business significantly.

[RedStateRocker]

I’d be very surprised if any of those lawsuits get very far. People here are freaking out over the possibility of huge numbers of horrific crashes; we have thousands of them every day in the USA (3800+ according to a quick Googling just now), no way are there going to be anywhere near a 10th of that with driverless. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point the default in a human vs. driverless crash is going to be the presumption that the person was at fault.

Like I said, I’m willing to bet money on driverless being widely adopted, regardless of the opposition, and being the ‘normal’ in a few decades.