US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

This is an opinion almost certainly based more in emotion than logic, but I don't think I could trust any sort of fully autonomous driving system that didn't involve communication with transmitters along the road itself (like a glideslope and localiser for aircraft approaches) and with other cars on the road.

Motorway driving sure, there it's closer to fancy cruise control. But around town, no thank you. I regularly drive through some really crappily designed bits of road, like unlabelled approaches to multi-lane roundabouts where the lane you need to be in for a particular exit sorta just depends on what the people in front and to the side of you happen to have chosen. If it's difficult as a human to work out what the intent is, I don't trust a largely computer vision-based system to work it out.

The roads here are also in a terrible state, and the lines on them even moreso. There's one particular patch of road where the lane keep assist in my car regularly tries to steer me into the central reservation, because repair work has left what looks a bit like lane markings diagonally across the lane.

Potential problem with transmitters is that they could be faked.

You could certainly never rely on them alone.

There are lots of other areas where intentionally violating FCC regulations to transmit harmful signals is already technologically feasible and cheap, but hasn't become a widespread problem in practice. Why would it be any worse for cars communicating with each other? If anything, having lots of cars on the road logging what they receive from other cars (spoofed or otherwise) would make it too easy to identify which signals are fake, thwarting potential use cases like insurance fraud (since it's safe to assume the car broadcasting fake data is at fault in any collision).

I agree, the problem has been solved.

If a consensus mechanism similar to those used in blockchain were implemented, vehicles could cross-reference the data they receive with data from multiple other vehicles. If inconsistencies are detected (for example, a car reporting a different speed than what others are observing), that data could be flagged as potentially fraudulent.

Just as blockchain technologies can provide a means of verifying the authenticity of transactions, a network of cars could establish a decentralized validation process for the data they exchange. If one car broadcasts false data, the consensus mechanism among the surrounding vehicles would allow for the identification of this "anomaly", similar to how fraudulent transactions can be identified and rejected in a blockchain system.

What you mentioned with regarding to insurance could be used as a deterrent, too, along with laws making it illegal to spoof relevant data.

In any case, privacy is going to take a toll here, I believe.

This is a complicated, technical solution looking for a problem.

Simple, asymmetrically-authenticated signals and felonies for the edge cases solve this problem without any futuristic computer wizardry.