This makes for a fascinating listen .... Malcolm Gladwell in his Revisionist History Podcast talking about the 'sudden acceleration' problems that Toyota faced in 2009. His conclusion - operator error.

Seriously - and you have to listen to the podcast to get it - after all - you wouldn't expect me to summarize the closing arguments of Perry Mason in a couple of paragraphs - would you ?

Beyond this though, it made me stop and think about driverless cars.

As they get involved n collisions, people - despite any and all evidence to the contrary - will assume that there has been some kind of machine error that caused the accident, before they think it could be a person's fault.

That is the essence of the Gladwell argument. It will happen.