I don't know if competence is overestimated compared to the willingness to persistently pay attention and simultaneously remember that it takes approximately 3

I don't know if competence is overestimated compared to the willingness to persistently pay attention and simultaneously remember that it takes approximately 3 seconds to go from happily driving along to stopped in the highway in a wreckage wondering if your family is still alive or if you'll ever walk again. Which is to say, the risks of driving have become so sanitized, that we think it's something that is easy to automate. Arguably, if all road lanes were made 18 inches more narrow, we'd have a lot of the same effects. You have to pay a lot more attention in a narrow lane than one that is super wide. Generally though, humans are very competent drivers when paying attention and patient. The other part, it's hard to be patient given how much time is spent travelling via car and stuck in traffic jams. People get used to zooming around at 40 ~ 70mph, combined with the over-confidence of from the illusion of safety (all the road signs, extra wide lanes, road markers, obstructions removed from the road)... I think it just combines to a place where humans are poor drivers because they become impatient and stop paying attention all the time. It's like that first day of work, where everything you do - you have to think about incredibly hard. Eventually it all becomes 'auto-pilot', and this is encouraged by the road infrastructure; even to the extent that we think it's an easy problem to automate.