First driverless car fatality should give industry pause -Gadfly: Tesla announced last week the first death of one of their car owners whose vehicle was driving in semi-autonomous mode. When a tractor trailer crossed the highway at a perpendicular angle to the vehicle, “Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky,” the company said.

David Fickling at Bloomberg Gadfly argues the accident should serve as a notice to Tesla, Google, Uber and other industry players to slow down in their rush for driverless car adoption by sometime around 2020 to 2025. However, Fickling reiterates that autonomous vehicles are generally safer and will likely prevent more accidents than they cause. In the meantime, “There’s a longstanding dynamic where new transport technologies tend to produce spikes in fatalities before engineers learn the lessons of real-world accidents and make systems safer than the status quo. Driverless cars are unlikely to be an exception.” (Read All driving is dangerous, Tesla)