Incidentally, in aviation and aerospace, everybody reads crash reports. Pilots study them in training. Engineers read them at work. Flying magazine publishes monthly summaries in their "Aftermath" column. The safety culture is very different from software. In commercial aviation, just about all the single points of failure have already been dealt with. It's a design criterion of aviation that there must be a way to recover from single failures. When you're one single failure away from real trouble, it's time to land. When you read a crash report today, there are two or three things that went wrong, not just one. That's what a safety culture looks like. Self-driving cars may have to get there.

[1] http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HWY...

Once the car comes out of autonomous mode we can assign them some liability, depending on the situation.

At the same time, I'm hard put to think of products/services used by consumers--outside of medicine perhaps--where it's the norm that sometimes "shit happens" because statistics and it's not considered reasonable to sue the manufacturer (though we often still do).

Interesting times. Especially given that the facts (and the degree of automation) won't typically be nearly as clear cut especially over the next few decades.