The Road to Autopia?

A news story this week about the reporting of accidents involving self-driving cars pointed out something we might have expected. While the coming of these cars may very well reduce car accidents significantly -- and that will be a wonderful thing -- it definitely remains to be seen if they will lead to a truly brave new world without serious automotive personal injury cases. We can hope for a major reduction in fatalities and crippling injuries, but a world free of automotive dangers is a mighty tall order.

Indeed, while Google and other makers of experimental driverless cars are telling us that all of the accidents so far have been the fault of drivers of more conventional autos, and we have no reason to doubt them, our very strong hunch is that the work of an LA accident lawyer won't be over and done with any time soon. For starters, of course, even if driverless cars become ubiquitous, they are unlikely to be mandatory for at least a matter of many decades. That means the element of human error will still be with us for quite some time to come.

And, of course, there's also the potential for non-human error. At this point, we just don't know how foolproof the cars made by companies like Google are likely to be, especially at first. After all, it's one thing to create a really useful search engine, it's quite another to make an engine-driven machine that will never malfunction its way into a serious accident.

Sadly, people like our own Cameron Yadidi Brock will likely be needed to help car accident victims for a long time to come. Still, it's definitely good that we're starting to work on building a better automotive world. In order for things to improve, sometimes it's essential to try and achieve the seemingly impossible.