For extra credit: describe what the reaction time is for Waymo's driverless cars are during various points of the garbage collection cycle.
People here have a tendency to imagine an idealized version of driverless cars and assume that actual driverless cars are the idealized versions of those cars, and then compare the idealized cars to very non-idealized humans.
I think that the real world is going to be more complicated than that.
It is easy to write code that takes a non-trivial amount of time to process to the point of output on any given hardware. I imagine that all of us have done that at various times. We can certainly imagine that reaction time could be a virtue of driverless cars -- even 99th percentile reaction time. Given sufficient hardware (and not just hardware on the core CPU/ram chips -- this is hardware out to the sensors and the subprocessors associated with each of them).
Similarly, we could imagine putting enough sensors on the vehicle that it truly has 360 degree awareness and visibility. But we do see real cars in the real world that have surprising blindspots.
There are cost tradeoffs to all of these things, and complexity tradeoffs. Is there a happy medium? I think that there very likely is, even without any fundamental advances in the state of the art. Are we within a year or two of that happy medium? Maybe.