> if the car has the capacity for manual override, the owner (negligence) There are plenty of ways a self-driving car could mess up and cause an accident where

> if the car has the capacity for manual override, the owner (negligence) There are plenty of ways a self-driving car could mess up and cause an accident where you do not have enough time to react to it. Not "you should have been paying more attention". As in "You are not superhuman enough to react in time, period". Say, swerving on the highway into oncoming traffic. Some (incredibly rough) numbers: if you're going 108km/h and the car suddenly swerves into the other lane of a two-lane highway, if it's 20m between start of swerve and hitting the vehicle in the other lane, that's 2/3 of a second. You can't do that. You (or rather, an average person) are not going to be able to recover in time. The reaction time for an alert driver is something like 0.7s on average. [1] And that's not the most pessimistic assumptions either. [1] First link I found: http://www.technology-assoc.com/articles/reaction-time.html http://www.technology-assoc.com/articles/reaction-time.html