Oddly, this sounds about right considering the weight you would have to bear forever if you ever hear of some fatal incident involving some technology you built.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/self-d...
This being said, having to balance business issues and safety of a system with as long a lever-arm as this seems blindingly difficult. I wonder hos much of the real work here is ultimately more like insurance than engineering ( as if there were any real difference to start with ).
It's not like all military contractor engineers live under a constant cloud of self hatred and suicidal thoughts, either, and they build things that are about trading "many" "enemy" casualties for "few" "friendly" ones. By contrast, self driving is doing almost entirely good along any moral spectrum.
An analogous process is lineman safety in the electric grid; at one point the probability of fatal accident for electric linemen was quite high, and it declined to next to nothing as safety procedures improved.
I don't think it'll really be safe until autonomous cars have transponders and can negotiate space in real time, but then you still have all the legacy vehicles out there that don't have transponders.
Behind the house, the second most expensive purchase in a typical person's life is their car, and yet in a car's lifetime, only 2.56% is spent driving on roads with the remainder spent parked or in traffic.
Sounds good to me.