It is entirely possible that self-driving vehicles will not be any better than human drivers, and they'll just commit different categories of errors. It may be

It is entirely possible that self-driving vehicles will not be any better than human drivers, and they'll just commit different categories of errors. It may be that it really does just take general intelligence to drive a car, and that perfection is impossible in the current environment and infrastructure. I don't think "this is a clearly a development phase" means anything when there's no guarantee self-driving cars will actually reduce deaths. It may be that the way forward is simply more advanced driver assist technology that better accounts for human psychology, and not fully autonomous cars. All these sacrifices for a future of autonomous driving may simply be a waste. Personally, I don't think these cars should be on public roads until they get a lot better. We're just introducing a new class of accidents; human drivers generally make the same kinds of errors and other drivers can reason about what they're thinking. Computers are more likely to fail in (to humans) surprising and bizarre ways. What we have now is the worst of both worlds. As an aside, if we really wanted to do something, I suspect the easiest way to save thousands of lives a year right now would be to implement mandatory functionality on all smartphones to shut off the screen when the phone is moving faster than 5mph. This would inconvenience people and passengers would be annoyed, but there was, after all, a time before smartphones.