Let&#x27;s look at the problems:<p>- Liability: the CEO of Volvo says that the manufacturer is liable if the vehicle crashes in autonomous mode.  That&#x27;s probably the way this will work out. That&#x27;s a good thing; it means the manufacturer has every incentive to avoid crashes.  Manufacturers will insure against this and build that into the price.<p>- User tracking: OnStar has that now. The next question is whether Big Google will permit you to opt out.  Urmson, Google&#x27;s head of automatic driving, says they don&#x27;t need car to car communication. It&#x27;s better to use sensor data. Lots of things on the road won&#x27;t be equipped to talk, anyway.<p>- Information leakage: what&#x27;s the question?  Security, or privacy?<p>- Failure modes: there needs to be enough backup capability to get the vehicle stopped without a collision after any single component failure, and enough fault detection to detect any single component failure.  It&#x27;s probably sufficient to have two forward-facing radars with a backup computer monitoring the second one, dual actuators for steering and brakes, and backup throttle cutoff.  The other side of failure is driving into a situation that the system can&#x27;t handle.  But that&#x27;s usually a problem that appears slowly, as with heavy rain or fog, rather than all at once.<p>- Aggressiveness settings: this hasn&#x27;t been a big problem for Google, other than having to edge into intersections in some situations.  Self-driving cars have an edge in that they can look in all directions simultaneously, which means they can merge more precisely instead of more aggressively.