As a petrolhead and passionate driver, it makes me cringe whenever people push for self-driving cars, because I know that enough voices lobbying would wind up m

As a petrolhead and passionate driver, it makes me cringe whenever people push for self-driving cars, because I know that enough voices lobbying would wind up making it illegal to have a mass of meat behind the wheel. Don't get me wrong, this is not a criticism, and it's not directed at anyone in particular. I know human drivers make mistakes. We have limits. We miss cues, underestimate distances, are regularly overconfident in our abilities, and innocent people like Mike Rawson die because of it. And yes, it is a supreme tragedy when a life is ended in an entirely preventable way. The author's pain is very evident, almost wanting to be held to blame for the accident. Because it has been deemed an accident - he was not at fault, there were no circumstances that lay the blame entirely at his feet. It was a simple, freak accident, with a completely non-simple fatal outcome. I guess I am lucky (and I know it is luck, nothing more) that I do not have family or friends I have lost in a car crash. But like the author, I love to drive. I love to be in control of a fast-moving machine, but only because I trust myself to drive without significant risk to myself, my passengers or pedestrians. I enjoy the challenge of reading the road ahead in search of hazards, I am always careful to use appropriate speed where there may be people on foot. It will be my greatest achievement if my entire time behind the wheel, I never come close to harming anyone else. I won't go into huge detail about the Uber accident - yes, the technology failed just like the human in this situation, and the conclusion is yet to be reached, but I am willing to accept that autonomous vehicles will achieve their goals of being safer than a human driver. As I mentioned earlier, humans are very fallible. We build machines to compensate for our weaknesses. We built the car to compensate for our lack of speed and stamina. We built computers to compensate for our lack of logical reasoning and swift decision-making. It's only logical the two would go together, but as the accident proved, technology isn't perfect, because it's built by imperfect hands. I have no doubt autonomous cars will be safer than humans, but I think they will never reach a 100% perfect record. They're built by humans, and to be human is to make mistakes. Frequently avoidably, regularly through ignorance, seldom through malice, but nonetheless mistakes are made. I just hope that as the technology spreads wider it doesn't force those of us who drive for the pleasure of it off the road. Car crashes are a huge statistical cause of unnecessary death, that cannot be denied, but let's not forget - there's a lot of humans on this planet, and there's a lot of different (and often quite creative) ways of mistakenly causing avoidable deaths. Because wherever humans are involved, accidents will inevitably follow. And sometimes, just like this, there's really no-one to blame except homo sapiens.