Or more completely: In the absence of malice or extreme negligence there’s nothing criminal to punish at all and money damages should suffice. Given a 100x lower occurrence of accidents this should be insurable for ~1% the cost. The default answer is drivers remain financially responsible for damages (but insurance gets cheaper) and driver can’t be criminally negligent short of modifying/damaging the car in an obviously bad way (e.g. failing to fix a safety critical sensor in a reasonable amount of time that would have prevented the crash. Alternately, bypassing one or more safety features that could have prevented the crash). Car companies would be smart to lobby to keep it that way as letting every car accident become a product liability thing would be much more expensive.
Or more completely: In the absence of malice or extreme negligence there’s nothing criminal to punish at all and money damages should suffice. Given a 100x lower occurrence of accidents this should be insurable for ~1% the cost. The default answer is drivers remain financially responsible for damages (but insurance gets cheaper) and driver can’t be criminally negligent short of modifying/damaging the car in an obviously bad way (e.g. failing to fix a safety critical sensor in a reasonable amount of time that would have prevented the crash. Alternately, bypassing one or more safety features that could have prevented the crash). Car companies would be smart to lobby to keep it that way as letting every car accident become a product liability thing would be much more expensive.