Well you can say it would be infuriating to be unable to take risks to save let's say your wife dying in the car but you can't argue that it's a GOOD thing to take those risks... who are you to decide that it is worth risking others lives to try to save one ?
"you can't argue that it's a GOOD thing to take those risks... who are you to decide that it is worth risking others lives to try to save one ?"
That's exactly what I argue about. In a rare (but very important) occasion where risk taking would be needed, you're forcing the moral dilemma of an even rarer occurrence with a presumed victim. We don't know if it would come to that. For all I care there might be only some speeding on a rainy road. My car will recommend going slowly for my own sake, but in that moment I care less for me personally and more for avoiding wife's impending death. Actually, I fear that my car will not limit itself to recommending, it will force that on me, because it knows better, because the people behind the said decisions won't be only the engineers trying give their best, but also lawyers doing "mercantile calculation of legal liability", politicians trying to score on public safety through their regulations, and so on!
I understand you and again it will be something to have in mind during design of said cars but I don't think this will be a huge problem.
Even if the problem exists in the early days, I'm pretty sure this is the kind of things that can be dealt with easily later. Those car are already capable of evaluating dangerous situations for others and I don't think that's unreasonable to believe that they will adapt their comportment to conditions and even in some special cases allow for risks taking if it only concerns the one that chose so.
And don't forget that we don't speak about only one company. There will be concurrence as it exists today and if some constructors are so limiting in the behavior of their cars that people die in it when conditions would have allowed to save them otherwise then soon enough someone will come with a car that can deal with that situation and so forth.
The social contract is such that people can reasonably be assumed to be ok with a minuscule increase in risk in order to get a dying person to the hospital.