There will always be unexpected situations, especially while we still have human drivers on the road. Ultimately, if you want to actually get anywhere while the

There will always be unexpected situations, especially while we still have human drivers on the road. Ultimately, if you want to actually get anywhere while there are other cars on the road, you have to make some assumptions about how they're going to behave. And even when you're completely automated, there may still be unexpected failures that cause these situations. However, I'm not sure the ethics of this are such a big deal, because the decision is such a tiny part of the causation of the eventual accident. I think it's far more likely that people will write code that just keeps trying to dodge until it can't any more, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Ultimately you have to make some compromises on safety vs resources, and deciding not to spend time writing special behaviour for pathological cases is no more ethically suspect than deciding not to spend any more time improving the brakes.