Genuine question, can anybody answer how these cars will:
1) Allow for situational aspects of driving eg I need to get there quickly so might drive faster because I'm running late? 2) Protect from people intentionally take advantage of safety mechanisms eg cutting in front, stepping out onto the road?
My guess is that it won't cater for either of those cases. It seems unlikely that Google would program their cars to break the speed limit just to save you a few minutes (speeding probably saves you a lot less time than you think it does). Also, I cannot see why anyone would deliberately and continuously take advantage of the automatic safety mechanisms on self-driving cars such that the problem would be common enough that it would cause a passenger any irritation.
No safety system is perfect and fatal accidents won't drop to zero (even with the best self-driving systems), so I guess people generally won't do 2) because they don't want to get killed.
I think we'll adjust laws to handle 2). There will be more than enough court-admissible sensor data from cars to sue offenders from here to the Mars and back.
