Why is it preferable to wait for people to die and then sue the company instead of banning it in the first place?

People die in car crashes all the time. Self driving can kill a lot of people and still be vastly better than humans.

But who gets the ticket when a self-driving car is at fault?

> who gets the ticket when a self-driving car is at fault?

Whoever was in control. This isn’t some weird legal quagmire anymore, these cars are on the road.

Apparently it IS still a legal conundrum: https://www.motortrend.com/news/who-gets-a-ticket-when-a-way...

And will continue to be until every municipality implements laws about it.

They don't have to die first. The company can avoid the expense by planning how not to kill people.

If you charged car makers $20m per pedestrian killed by their cars regardless of fault you'd probably see much safer designs.

> They don't have to die first. The company can avoid the expense by planning how not to kill people.

This is an extremely optimistic view on how companies work

I can think of one example where something similar works. The requirements from insurance companies on airline pilots are considerable tougher than the government ones because they are on the hook for ~$200m if they crash.

A big reason car companies don't worry much about killing pedestrians at the moment is it costs them ~$0.

We cannot even properly ban asbestos, expecting people to die first is just having a realistic perspective on how the US government works WRT regulations.

This doc from 1999 has an answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE

Usually its capitalism, because in America, they can just buy carveouts after the fact.