Monday brought news that came as absolutely no surprise: there’d been a fatal accident involving a driverless car.

The car, being tested by taxi app giant Uber, ran down a 49-year-old woman, ending her life, Tempe, Arizona police said.

What a way to go.

Uber didn’t try and blame the woman for being out walking at 10pm on a Sunday, which was nice. And it suspended self-driving car testing in San Francisco, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Toronto.

Just picture NSW Transport bosses wringing their hands wondering what loopholes and incentives could be offered to get Sydney included on the list of driverless car test sites. Mandarins roaring at underlings: “They use toll roads and tunnels, they have backwards facing seats, they don’t charge for drivers – GET US ON THAT LIST!”

I’m a driverless skeptic, in no hurry to see this spread. I don’t see many problems on our roads that are caused by having too much driver behind the wheel.

I do see plenty caused by people acting not enough like a driver, or not mastering driving before discovering speed – and plenty caused by people who don’t devote their whole attention to driving safely. 

But it does pose some nice ethical and legal question marks.

In a crash, where does fault lie when you’re dealing with computerised decision-making? Can a computer make a “mistake”, or are its actions always a deliberate function of programming? And in that case, would programmers, and design plans, have to be cross-examined to find the critical fault?

And what about breaking the road rules?

For human drivers, road offences are strict liability, which means you were either breaking the rule or not – doesn’t matter why or whether you were provoked etc. But what if there’s a machinery malfunction? Does this lessen fault for the driverless car?

That would give the non-existent driver more rights than a human driver, who can’t plead malfunction unless they suffer an unexpected heart attack or the like.

And what of Uber – would a robot driver invent surge pricing, or does that take a peculiarly human kind of deviousness?

For now, let’s drop the driverless cars. How about some more carless drivers?