And this is the classic theory vs pragmatism problem in a nutshell. You've done a good job of explaining why humans SHOULD be horrifically bad drivers in theory.

There is a slight problem. In practice, in actual measured statistics, we're utterly fantastic drivers despite all the reasoning.

We need a baseline. How about trains? Trains in the PTC and semi-PTC era don't (can't) speed and are monitored to crazy 1984 levels, usually there are two employees in the cab (not counting subway type things, I mean real Amtrak here). Trains don't have steering wheels, usually can't spin out, etc. Still the death rate is about 1/2 per billion passenger-miles. What can I say, brakes fail, drivers have heart attacks, rails crack. Its apparently impossible to put squishy humans in a sealed box and toss that box around at 90 MPH without killing about one per two billion miles. Note that's to the moon and back 4000 times, safer than even spacecraft.

The death rate for passenger cars is about 7 per billion passenger miles. A little higher for trucks/SUVs, a little lower for cars (cars are safer on the road, more stable).

That's only about 14 times worse than trains.

Anecdotally human drivers do dumb things, because there's 7 billion people and world wide networks every form of idiocy is known to all, yet simultaneously its very rare. Anecdotally a billion passenger miles isn't very far, so every year we stack bodies like cordwood, sadly. But even on the ultimate in safety, a train, we'd still have 10th the number of dead. By reasoning the ratio should be immensely larger than 14, like 1000 or 1000000. But its 14. That has to be answered...

Even crazier to consider is the death rate has dropped by a factor of 3 since the 1970s due to better engineering and regulation. We KNOW how to lower death rates using existing techniques. Yet we also know software written by humans is basically worthless. So given a choice of strategies to further lower death rates, given the track records I'd trust the MechEng and CivEng a lot more than the CS department.

A factor of 14 reduction in death rates is unfortunately far more likely to come from the MechEng/CivEng grads than the CS grads, and I say that as a CS grad.