I wonder if California will change their minds about testing without anyone behind the wheel now?

 This month, California said that, in April, it would start allowing companies to test autonomous vehicles without anyone behind the wheel.
end partial quote from:

Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Pedestrian - The New York Times

I have always thought that having vehicles (especially semi-trucks) without anyone behind the wheel is insane. Unless you are going to be spending millions and billions of dollars in testing of self driving devices to the level of what you are putting in a predator drone (and even then it won't be perfect) people are still going to be killed by self driving computer driven cars and trucks.

As someone who learned to program computers in the 1960s self driving vehicles and planes are a "Fairly tale" to the uneducated about how fragile actually programming actually is.

The software is fragile because of corruption and degradation over time.

It is vulnerable to electrical signals traveling through the car which could be electrical shorts or just cell phone information in zeros and ones flying through the car to the jarring of the car causing software to erode and degrade.

Then you have the hardware which can have Anything possible go wrong with it.

Then you have software interfacing with hardware in a previously unknown or unheard of way.

So, ALL the problems of a self driving vehicle are basically unknown to people not familiar with how hardware and software interface. It is like playing Jenga and just one piece out of alignment can make the whole thing come tumbling down and someone dies (either the driver, the passengers or someone on the street) like in Arizona.