Just because you make your large industrial robots look like cars does not mean you should be able to test them in the street where the kids and old people (and everybody else) exist and do their thing. It's fucking insane (and I almost never swear online.)
...Alongside the giant human-controlled robots piloted by random people who presumably passed some kind of half-hour driving test at some point in the past, somewhere in the world.
We know full well that those drivers are one of the leading causes of death in the country, but we shrug it off.
With the press watching self-driving companies like hawks waiting to freak out over any mistake (OMG, self-driving cars caused a traffic jam in SF! Better tell everybody in the world!) I feel okay about having them on the road.
Item: humans driving huge machines on every street is and always has been totally insane.
The reason we do it is because of a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign. No really. See: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime (Adam Ruins Everything)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
You can see the origin of the situation from this extraordinary film shot just before the 1906 Earthquake: "San Francisco, a Trip down Market Street, April 14, 1906" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8
You can see that horses, horse-drawn wagon and carts, and pedestrians could and did mix together in the public way. There are also early automobiles, and the problem is obvious: cars accelerate faster than horses. Already we can see reckless driving by cars that is only possible due to their ability to accelerate quickly!
BTW, just for the record, cars themselves are generally awesome. It must be said. Cars are cool.
It's only when we use them as mass-transportation and/or mix them with non-car-driving people (bikes, pedestrians, etc.) that it becomes mad.
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Ergo, safe automatic automobiles can't come soon enough!
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However, none of the above justifies using random people without their consent as test dummies in an open-air testing facility for massive, fast robots.
That's also insane.
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To me it seems obvious that you do two things:
1) Start with slow light robots! Build a nerf foam golf cart that is limited to 5mph and get that working reliably. Going straight for Knight Industries Two Thousand right out of the gate is a fetish.
2) Build a demo city and populate it with people who have signed a release. In fact there's already a test city out in the desert somewhere for to test IoT and smart city stuff. Pay some people to live there and walk around and risk getting creamed by your robots there.
Just because you make your large industrial robots look like cars does not mean you should be able to test them in the street where the kids and old people (and everybody else) exist and do their thing. It's fucking insane (and I almost never swear online.)