Last week Tesla hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. One of its customers was killed when the Autopilot feature in his Model S car failed to tell the difference between a white truck and a bright piece of sky.

The incident has led to questions being asked about the safety of driverless cars and if we should press the brake on the autonomous driving revolution, which has accelerated rapidly in the last 12 months with some predicting that autonomous vehicles will be on our roads as soon as 2018.

Despite the Tesla fatality and apparent failure of its autonomous technology — and two subsequent accidents also involving Autopilot — the hurdles to adoption of driverless cars isn't better technology but with convincing the people sitting behind the wheel to trust those machines and getting in charge of governing our roads to speed up regulation.

It may seem to many like an overnight revolution, but the journey to getting driverless cars on the road has been happening for well over a decade. Back in 2004, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) organised the first Grand Challenge, which saw teams compete for a $1 million prize by building a driverless car to travel a 240km route. 

None of the vehicles finished the course but this was the start of a concerted effort to make the technology work.

This surge in development of the driverless car has been driven not by the traditional car industry but by technology companies like Google which began its efforts back in 2009 and has since seen its autonomous vehicles drive more than 2.4 million kilometres on public roads in the US.

While Google is still very much in the testing phase, Tesla has been at the forefront of getting this technology onto the road, rolling out its semi-autonomous Autopilot feature in 2015 — which has been activated for over 210 million kilometres already. Autopilot promises to use the car's combination of cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors and data to automatically steer down the highway, change lanes, and adjust speed in response to traffic. 

In parallel with this, pretty much every major traditional car company — Ford, Nissan, BMW, Audi, Toyota and many more — are all actively pursuing driverless car technologies. Add to this ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft which are both looking to eliminate their biggest cost — drivers — with autonomous technology, and it is clear that there is a lot of interest in getting this new mode of transport off the ground.

Last month Elon Musk said: “I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem” adding that fully autonomous cars will be ready to roll off production lines within two years.

The question is, is it feasible — or indeed responsible — to have driverless cars on our roads by 2018 — are we ready to embrace a driverless future?

Whatever about anywhere else in the world, the driverless car revolution is very unlikely to happen in Ireland. According to a spokesperson at the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport “the law at present does not provide for driverless cars” and any “testing of driverless cars in this jurisdiction would therefore have to be on private land rather than on public roads.”

Any change in law would need to be examined in conjunction with the Office of the Attorney General as well as regulators in Brussels , though the Department says it will be monitoring how law makers in other countries are handling this change.

Ireland’s law makers need only look across the Irish Sea to see a government making every possible allowance for companies looking to make the UK the world leader in this type of technology.

As well as funneling tens of millions of pounds into helping develop this technology, the government this week began an open consultation about how it can tweak regulations to make them compatible with driverless cars.

While the rules of the road themselves are a stumbling block, an even bigger issue is that of insurance, something which is seen as among the most contentious issues among car makers, regulators and insurers. 

While one UK insurer has already launched a driverless car insurance policy, the real question which needs to be address is who is to blame — the person in the car or the company who built the car?

While Volvo has already said it would take responsibility for its cars when in autonomous mode, that is just one manufacturer and just like a possible patchwork of legislation in different countries around the world, we could see different manufacturers taking different approaches to these questions.

Tesla seems to be trying to absolve itself of responsibility in the recent fatal crash, by pointing out that Autopilot “is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times,“ and that ”you need to maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle” while using it.

 “Who is accountable for the risk? The machine? The satellite link? This is the kind of stuff that needs to be figured out and what the regulators are still working on,” said Robert Dickie, Chief Technology Officer at Zurich insurance said last month.

A spokesperson for Zurich insurance in Ireland told Newstalk.com that no one in Ireland has so far  requested terms for any self driving vehicle in Ireland but if there was an application, it would be subject to "a normal underwriting review and dealt with on a case by case basis." The spokesperson added that the company already provides cover for semi-autonomous cars with advanced driver assistance systems though they didn't specifically mention Tesla's Autopilot feature. 

While Musk thinks driverless cars will be ready by 2018, others have a much later date in mind. The European Commission has set itself a deadline of 2030 to have regulations in place to allow for autonomous vehicles on the roads. 

We already have a lot of autonomous features in our cars today. From emergency braking systems to collision avoidance systems, these technologies have been creeping into our cars over the last couple of years.

However aside from getting the technology right, regulating self-driving cars and insuring these vehicles, there remains what could be the most significant hurdle when it comes to getting drivers to trust a fully autonomous vehicles it seems. 

According to a survey by the American Automobile Association earlier this year, 75 percent of U.S. drivers fear driverless cars. UK drivers appear to be slightly more inclined to try driverless cars, with a What Car? survey suggesting 51 percent of those questioned saying they would feel unsafe and very unsafe getting into a car that drove itself.

So it appears Google, Tesla, and all the car manufacturers will have to convince drivers that this is the future before we can all finally take our hands off the wheel for good.