> Human drivers killing themselves and others are a part of human nature, but will politicians and the public accept that people get killed through no fault of their own by mistakes machines make?
This has already happened with manufacturer defects. It's just more of the same. As long as a clear liability boundary can be established in principle, there's no problem.
If autonomous driving can be delivered with accident-causing failure rates similar to those of general manufacturer defects (i.e., much lower odds than accidents caused by human error), then I think that would be sufficient. But if say we go from ~35k human-caused road deaths/year to ~10k autonomous-driving caused deaths/year, that may be seen as unacceptably high.
This has already happened with manufacturer defects. It's just more of the same. As long as a clear liability boundary can be established in principle, there's no problem.