Once the machines are better than humans at a macro level, insurance companies will notice, and I think this will cause widespread adoption pretty quickly.
> “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,”
It doesn't matter if it's objectively safer; people have no issue doing dangerous things so long as they can maintain the illusion of control.
In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets.
A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft.
Astronaut deaths where sadly common, but also expected and did little to slow progress.
Umm, reasonably sure that implementing a legal speed limit was an initial response, in the UK at least. It took a number of years (and likely a lot of propaganda, though I haven't looked that closely into it and history is, of course, written by the victors) to allow motorcars to use roads at anything close to a reasonable speed.
Check wikipedia out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History
Watch this and suddenly those mentioned speed limits are completely reasonable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo
Note, 10MPH would allow for 2-3x the speed of a horse over long distances. So, in this alternate history cars would still have been very useful.
Thus you get jaywalking as a crime, and justified many deaths as people breaking the law instead of the naritive that cars are insanely dangerous and should be banned. In theory cars could have been banned, but in practice their advocates had little trouble changing perceptions.
If a pedestrian starts to cross the road, they have right of way. I've been on roads in some city centres where vehicles have to be very, very careful as there's a road through a pedestrianised area and people are rather bold crossing the road. If the vehicle was to cause injury, the driver would likely be liable.
No, it's literal control. They'd rather operate a vehicle in a way that's statistically less effective (where effective is defined by a collection of algorithms, we all know how perfect algorithmic generated routes are) than lose that control for a small benefit. Control itself is worth something to people.
Also, interesting fact: Subaru is achieving these impressive stats using stereo vision, not lidar.