Incremental introduction of driverless features will likely gradually diminish auto-related accidents and deaths, but if Google has truly cracked the code of visual recognition, then the process speeds forward. From Jacob Gershman at WSJ:

“Will Google’s self-driving car put a dent in personal-injury lawsuits?

Google, which just announced a ‘fully functional’ prototype of its self-driving car, is looking for auto industry partners to bring the technology to market within the next five years.

Watching those developments, legal blogger Eric Turkewitz, a personal injury lawyer with the Turkewitz Law Firm in New York, wonders what a future of Google cars will mean for his industry. Writes Mr. Turkewitz:

The issue of lawsuits regarding the cars will, I think, be vastly overwhelmed by a huge reduction in collisions that result from the most common forms of human error. Each year about 30,000 people will die in the U.S. from car crashes, and about two million are injured, and that is after considering a significant drop in fatalities from safer cars and seat belts over the prior decades….

And what will those newfangled cars do? They will see the other cars/pedestrians and slow down or stop despite the driver being lost in thought elsewhere. Or drunk. Or asleep.”