I don't know if that will be enough to make the difference, but I can certainly see how it could be.
You're still making a prediction about the future. Some predictions are safer than others: I predict I will see the sun rise tomorrow. Some predictions have little rational basis in reality: I predict you will agree with me. Your prediction about automomous cars being safer than human drivers? That falls somewhere in the middle.
From my perspective, all computer vision systems are abysmal crap and spend orders of magnitude more power to accomplish results many orders of magnitude less impressive than the human brain is capable of. The human brain uses something like 10-20 watts, how much CV/ML can you do with 10-20 watts? Not much at all. There is clearly a huge disconnect between our current approach to solving the problem technologically and how the evolutionary wetware solves the problem. That gap may be bridged sometime in the future, but I'm not holding my breath. I think the problem is being approached from the wrong direction, like trying to drive a screw with a hammer. Maybe we'll still get the job done, but I do not consider that a foregone conclusion.
I just hope that, if the time comes, the decision is based on comparative improvement, instead of hysterics about whether self driving cars will ever kill anyone ever.
* A car can spare 100x that many watts.
* Why would we even want cars to calculate the way humans do? It's a very clearly flawed method.
> Why would we even want cars to calculate the way humans do?
The fact of the matter is that humans are orders of magnitude better at object recognition than computers. You may believe that will change in the near future, but that's not yet been demonstrated.