Industry Pushes For Mandatory Aviation Style Inspections For Self Driving Cars

In aviation, you can't just pull over to the side of the road when something fails. That's why there are mandatory inspections after so many flight hours.

While I could see some limited benefit to this, it would likely only help with the owners that don't maintain their cars in the first place.

Read this as expensive to maintain and more profit for the dealerships. Also if you fail to maintain, insurance will void your claim.

everyone is covered except the driver, he is hung out to dry.

If the inspection does not involve a road test or physical sensor inspection, software diagnostic check can be done OTA in the case of Tesla's AP.

I would thin at visual inspection of the sensors would be part of it.

They have already had one malfunction on a Tesla due to a moth embedded on the sensor.

I don't see this as something that would necessarily have to be done at a dealer.

Again following the aviation model, there are far more private mechanics than large shops, and depending on the equipment to be tested the owner could be certified to maintain and inspect. Yes, a large moth disabled a Tesla, but that sort of failure cannot be inspected for, other than a "pre-flight" check. The system could self-check on startup and report any anomalies. For that Tesla incident, I think the car just needed a better alert to the driver that a system was compromised and that they needed to assume full driving control. For a fully-autonomous vehicle, such a self-check would have to be made continuously, and if a failure that affected the vehicle's driving ability it would need to pull off the road and stop.

This is one reason I would not accept an autonomous vehicle unless there were still driver controls available.