That brings up an interesting thought. Self-driving cars are going to have to come with automated tests that must be passed for the car to even start. You won't be able to make a choice about whether to drive around with a slightly broken car part like that. Some parts of the system will have to not only work, but work near perfectly or require service.
> You won't be able to make a choice about whether to drive around with a slightly broken car part like that.
As I mentioned in another post: cars already have these sensors in the form of short range (ultrasound?) sensors for parking. These are regularly covered with ice if you live in a winter climate, and in that situation the parking sensors will continuously beep when you have the car in reverse. A human driver just ignores that and backs out anyway, because you look with your eyes and see nothing, so you assume the warning is false and due to ice. The device isn't even broken, it's just temporarily not able to work until the ice has melted, which is a few hours away when the sun comes up.
An autonomous car could just say "I don't trust the readings from the sensors so you are on your own kid" and I'd drive. And that would be sort of fine (although it can't be several dozen mornings then it's annoying).
But an autonomous taxi can't do that. This is why I think assistant drivers such as teslas autopilot, that can just defer driving to a human, will be around for a very long time (Decades) before we have fully autonomous cars that can drive without backup driver.
