I mean, I suppose this doesn't really have all that much to do with automated driving. But yes, I do support much greater liability for the people or entities

I mean, I suppose this doesn't really have all that much to do with automated driving. But yes, I do support much greater liability for the people or entities that operate motor vehicles. I think you should focus on civil penalties, not criminal. Criminal penalties for bad driving would not work in America, politically. Besides, higher insurance minimums help to make the cost of operating dangerous machinery around other people be born by the people who are choosing to operate that machinery. much greater insurance requirements and greater civil penalties will raise the cost of driving to include the cost of the injuries caused by driving (right now, where I am, the insurance minimum is like a month or two of software engineer wages... so obviously, your insurance bill doesn't cover the likely cost if you actually injure or kill a person) Of course, this would make driving a lot more expensive (well, it would shift the cost away from the people who are hit to the people who are choosing to drive these dangerous machines) and realistically would only work in urban areas where there is decent public transit. (Or maybe you could do something with geofencing insurance; you are a lot more likely to hit a person in an urban area, so maybe insurance in low-population areas would be cheaper, if you never drove in areas with a lot of other people?) If anything, I think self-driving cars would make this slightly better, as the only sane way to insure them is for the company that created and maintained the self-driving system insure it, and that means there are deeper pockets behind the thing; deep enough to pay for the loss of a human life, or to repair a human.