However, in a society where people can observe the actions of others and form motivations in response to policies, etc, you'll find that because society reacts fairly poorly to organ harvesting, because organ harvesting is implausible to do at scale without extra bad things happenning, etc, the utilitarian solution is actually not to go about doing it.

Only a naive utilitarian wouldn't try to also remain consistent with something like a Kantian imperative of global self-coherence.

Now, as for cars and testing self-driving on real folks, well, this may be something where the water is pretty murky. I think that society will react poorly enough to early bad events in self-driving that a measured approach is actually the best for saving lives in the long term.

The critique here shouldn't be that "well, utilitarianism sure looks good from afar, but would you murder your neighbor?" It should be "The problem is too difficult to address with utilitarianism because it involves complex societal factors and responses."

There may be ways to avoid some of the other types of accidents, but those ones (which have happened several times) are difficult to escape.

The real question is what's the safety threshold - safer than median human? 90th percentile? 99th?

Also, there are some network effects at play here, the higher the percentage of self driving cars the more rare that situation should become.

> I don't think there was a single death directly because of autopilot (not 100% sure though).

There was a death, and it was very prominent.