We accept way less than perfection from our human drivers. Upwards of 35,000 people die in car accidents every year in the U.S., and another 4.4 million people suffer serious enough injury to seek medical attention, and yet we haven’t prohibited the use of the automobile. Autonomous vehicles will be imperfect. They’ll just be imperfect in different ways than human drivers. Autonomous vehicles are not distracted by their phones or by their kids. They won’t nod off behind the wheel on long highway drives. With 360 degree sensors don’t miss seeing cars or bicyclists in their blind spots. An autonomous car would not forget to look before pulling out of a parking space and collide with a cyclist — an incident I experienced as a cyclist. However, autonomous vehicles will make mistakes, including some which would likely have been avoided by a human driver. I don’t demand perfection from self-driving cars; I’ll be comfortable as long as they drive better than the humans I see on the road, which is not that high a bar.
Also, recognize that autonomy is a continuum. My current car has various blind-spot detectors, lane departure alert and correction features, and so on. We can keep making cars safer by adding more of these self-driving/driver-assist features in as the technology matures, even while they fall short of full autonomy.
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