While I have always laughed at the overly-optimistic hype of the technologists about self-driving cars, I am not as pessimistic as you are. You spend a lot of this article detailing the many problems of driving and then claim that taking the driver out of the equation would make driving more dangerous. I don’t have statistics, but I would think that the vast majority of accidents are due to driver error, or not being able to re-act to another driver’s error in time. Automating the whole process would take this element out, which must make things safer. Yes, we need to be as sure as possible about the reliability (and security)of the technology, and we need to deal with a number of regulatory/legal issues, but in principle I don’t see a problem with self-driving cars. Another respondent has mentioned the apparent success of the Google trial, and such trials are going to have a lot more scrutiny than the mainstream motor industry (remember this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls?)