What about hackers?

• It'll never happen, because if it's networked, it can get hacked. And if it can get hacked while traveling 70mph, you - and everyone around you - are going to have trouble.
  
  The internet will never happen, because if it's networked, it can get hacked. And if it can get hacked you could lose your entire life savings, your identity - and everyone around you - is going to have trouble.
  
  I see your point, but you are also forgetting something. When your computer gets hacked its annoying. If your business gets hacked you lose allot of money, perhaps jobs. When your car gets hacked, their is a real chance that someone will die, or several people die. It a whole new level of risk, one I am not sure automobile manufacturers are willing to take. Even the government may not want to take this sort of risk.
  
  The deaths from hacked cars will still be mere fractions of deaths via human driver error, though. If 33000 people died from hacked cars, there'd be a huge issue. If any number less than that happened, it would be a net safer system than what we have right now.
  
  But you need to ask yourself were the liability lies. Currently liability is easy to figure out and by and large as long as the manufactures don't make a mistake when designing or building the car they are not responsible. So what happens if a networked car is hacked? Who is on the hook for the liability? Sure you could say its the hackers fault, and you would be right. But usually the hacker isn't the one with millions of dollars. The lawyers aren't interested in them, they are interested in the ones with the deep pockets.
  
  I think a lot of people envision the traffic organism you describe, the whole pinging forward/back and warning to keep all cars' sensors working together to keep things safe for upcoming disasters.
  
  And as long as the vehicles have redundant, non-networked physical sensors (LIDAR or similar) that also tell the car if it's about to have a crash, the risks of hacking the "bigger" network aren't quite the concern some people believe (IMO). Sure wirelessly connecting between the cars could be exploited, but if the car's onboard (no network connection) sensors say it's about to plow into a truck it should still be able to override and press its own brakes. The only way you could hack that sensor is to plug directly into each car by a wire.
  
  I don't deny that there may be hacking risks, but why does everyone assume malicious people will immediately start going out and causing horrific car accidents for fun? That would easily be murder / attempted murder, hacking a car to make it crash into a wall and kill people. How often do we see news articles today about "pranksters" going around cutting people's brake lines for fun? You don't, because even those assholes know where the line is.
  
  What's to stop carjackers from jumping in your car tomorrow and driving you directly into the lake?
  
  And all this is why I want nothing to do with any of it. They've proved they can hack a car that even has simple electronics, I want nothing to do with one I have no control over. It's a death trap.
  
  How you feel is wrong. Even hackable, these cars will be objectively safer.
  
  They've already proven they can hack the car that you do drive. So this argument is nullified as the car can be hacked whether you drive it or the computer does.