While I agree with you generally, one could make the argument that if your aim is to drastically disrupt some domain, you may wish to adopt a riskier but faster path even if you're working in a safety-critical field, because the "slow and safe" route means more lives lost / negatively impacted while you slowly perfect your solution.
If you'd humor my extreme utilitarian view for a minute, I would argue both autonomous self driving and some medical endeavors could save many more lives if we, as a society, said "you get a budget of 10k. 10k lives you can severely negatively impact to deliver impact greater than that number" - basically giving you an investment/debt you repay to society via your future impact.
Currently, traffic fatalities are at ~38k/year in the US (with over 2M/year injured), and the numbers for leading medical causes are staggering (heart disease ~700k/year, cancer ~600k/year, etc.).
I would argue our current processes for breakthroughs in areas where health or safety are involved simply lean too far towards the "safe" end of the spectrum.
One anecdote I can share is a friend who worked for over a decade on a system where patients could buy a medical test at a pharmacy, take a urine sample at home, and get lab quality results using their phone's camera. The tech was ready in their first year of running. They built a suite of validations and tested things across hundreds of phone models, they really did their part well because they truly care.
Getting things FDA approved and in patients' hands took much longer, because the processes are extremally slow and designed to reduce risk by almost all means necessary. While that's a good idea in theory, it didn't stop a scam like Theranos (because when you're intentionally dishonest rules don't always help), and it did make it so my friend's company took a lot longer before being able to get fast, accurate, test results for many different metrics to rural and poor communities where lab testing can be an issue...