Can you compare the number of hours driven with the autopilot and compare it to the statistics of human drivers, and determine which was safer?
This was a fatal crash, but faulty airbags caused the death of 10 people.
What selfdriving cars needs, rather than more time to bake, is a PR or lobby group, that can help spin (put in perspective) these types of events.
Autopilot requires manual consent from the user to even enable it and has so many overrides for the user that I feel like you're really stretching it by calling it a "fatal flaw". All it would have taken to prevent this accident was the person driving to hit the brakes in time. Even if they were just using cruise control in their vehicle, they would have died. This was completely about inattention and irresponsibility on the part of the driver. I can't see how anyone is making the leap to this being a "fatal flaw" in the system.
Have you examined the history of air travel? Entire airliners have crashed and killed everyone on board and people still continued to take flights. Today airplanes are safer than even trains. The reason is simple: the industry is very heavily regulated and everyone has to adhere to strict processes with tight controls.
The reason is even simpler: private companies using private money to improve flight technology
Governments after all are run by people, just like companies, and people are prone to greed, corruption, and abuse of power, regardless of their position.