But human drivers kill a lot of people. It would be a shame if that's the best we can do. And some car tech improvements have saved lives, so it's not necessarily chauvinism it's just extrapolation.
To wit: It's not enough to say "Our self-driving cars avoid 14,000 drunk-driving, texting and asleep-at-the-wheel fatalities," if it's also true that: "Our self-driving cars hit and kill 30 errant pedestrians a year that a human driver would have noticed."
I know that 14,000 > 30. But the specter of roadway martyrs being murdered by killing machines needs only a few examples to sustain itself.
Tough problem to solve.
It will be a gradual transition as they learn how to handle more and more situations.
The vast majority of accidents by human drivers are caused by basic neglect, not tricky edge case situations. I think it's hard to really comprehend just how bad humans are at driving. It wouldn't take anything close to a perfect autonomous system to do better--just having "drivers" that actually pay attention to their surroundings all the time would be a massive improvement, even if there were occasional bugs and glitches.
Really? No one knows if we will ever improve on self-driving cars than the current technology today? I'm going to stick my neck out and say "Yes, I know that will move past that."
I don't believe a computer will ever be as good a driver as I am in my lifetime in terms of my personal safety, except for when I'm really old and possibly can't see well.