Google Self-Driving Car Test-Ride

(Eugene Volokh)

Randal O’Toole (Cato@Liberty) reports on his experience. The technology sounds very cool, and I take it that so far it has been pretty accident-free. Of course, my first reaction to hearing about this was “how dangerous!,” but it’s not like this is a new technology trying to replace an absolutely safe current technology — and it may well be that such a car is already safer than the average real driver, or will soon be safer. It will be very interesting to see how this develops (and of course to explore the legal dimensions).

Thanks to Opher Banarie for the pointer. Disclosure: I have occasionally worked on Google legal projects, and was recently commissioned by Google to write a white paper.