So when an autodriven car maims little Johnny, before they patch the bug to not run over future infants, then who's responsible and has to pay? What if other ca

So when an autodriven car maims little Johnny, before they patch the bug to not run over future infants, then who's responsible and has to pay? What if other cars maim more infants before they get around to patching what is now a known bug? You can't blame the driver, they weren't driving. The car manufacturers can't accept blame, as it costs a lot if you have to factor in the cost of a lifetime of support for a maimed infant. Even ignoring the fact that it only works on highways and not normal surface roads, Tesla's "beta" Autopilot feature takes no responsibility because the driver is still supposed to be holding the wheel. Also as any software developer would tell you, software updates would also be a problem in themselves. If you propose that cars be auto-updated automatically, I wonder how insurance would work when the car is running different software to the software it was originally insured with. Critical saftey systems can't get auto-updated without a lot of testing. What if the auto-update mechanism gets hacked, or maliciously changed by a disgruntled self-driving car employee? What if a legitimate update causes another bug where it maims the elderly now instead of infants? Do they roll back to the infant-maiming software now? I'm being silly but updates on critical safety stuff isn't so simple, especially with the legal ramifications. I think legal issues will be a problem for self-driving cars, maybe even a larger problem than the actual designing a working self-driving car problem. Someone has to be responsible for inevitable accidents (bugs?). After a century of being able to blame the driver, car companies won't want to change that status quo. Maybe insurance will decide that they'll cover self-driving cars if they prove themselves to be safe, but we'll see.