If the statistical reliability is better than a human driver, then this is good engineering.<p>&quot;Man bumps car into trailer&quot; would not have been a headline, because this happens so often it&#x27;s completely boring. Notably the cost of failure here is property damage. If the car were moving fast enough to endanger human life, then a driver would be behind the wheel, and fully responsible by law and common sense for the motion of the vehicle.<p>These headlines are going to become more common as autopiloted cars become more popular. It is important to frame them in the context of transitioning from a system that is <i>also</i> unreliable-- the human nervous system.<p>We should also expect to see a few machine failures in specific situations where a human could have avoided damage, but we must also consider them against the easily avoidable mistakes that humans make every day, which a machine can avoid with near 100% reliability.<p>People are afraid of airplane crashes because they&#x27;re dramatic, scary, newsworthy, and out of the passengers&#x27; control, but the complete story is that stepping on a plane is a safer activity than driving to the airport. Headlines about autopilot failures will get clicks for the same reasons, but if not framed with statistics, it&#x27;s just noise.