""The developers have yet to design or at least demonstrate a system that can achieve a socially acceptable level of risk across a wide range of driving conditions," says Bryant Walker Smith, an automated driving expert.
But developers are working on it. Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, says that companies are constantly testing cars in literally thousands of different scenarios. Google has driverless cars in several cities with varying terrain and weather. Tesla is gathering data from Autopilot users across the world and has no plans to stop.
Smith — whose research is on newlypossible.org — envisions a time when autonomous cars will make the roadways safer (at least 30,000 Americans die on roadways every year). Eventually, an autonomous car may be able to save its out-cold driver, too.
"It may be monitoring your vital signs. It may recognize you have a health problem. It may change course and start driving to the nearest hospital, pull up into the emergency bay and already have transmitted all your vital information to the emergency responders," Smith says. "It may even do that before you have a heart attack, potentially. At what point is your car actually a medical device? That may be sooner than we think.""