Presumably, computers can get better at driving cars while humans cannot, so eventually computers will win this particular competition like they've won on chess, go, and tons of other things.
But what computers are good at is not getting drunk, tired, and distracted.
We don't really care about the best human drivers. The challenge is preventing the worst human drivers from sitting behind the wheel and eliminating edge cases where an otherwise competent driver is not fit to drive due to some personal circumstance.
For example, school buses are the safest mode of transportation of any kind whatsoever in the US. Millions of kids ride naturally millions of miles per week and fatalities per year are usually in the single or double digits.
Professional drivers, professionally maintained equipment and set procedures really are enough. Most accidents happen as some combination of people in bad mental states, equipment in bad conditions and bad stuff like weather.
Remove that and driving is something people are pretty reliable at doing - especially, people don't really need faster reaction time 99% if they drive sensibly.
http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/news-and-res...
This, of course, doesn't scale. If everyone drove buses then buses would not be as safe. And let's not even talk about gas mileage...
> Professional drivers, professionally maintained equipment and set procedures really are enough.
There is something to that. We let people drive cars after close to zero training (something I personally find to be completely ridiculous, but the world is what it is...), and then we let them drive without any direct consequences of not paying attention (penalties for breaking traffic laws are absurdly low, and enforcement way too lenient). For the other extreme, compare with professional pilots.
That said, I feel that getting all cars self-driving will be much easier to achieve than restructuring society around professional driving only, or training every driver properly and giving them appropriate incentives.
Until AI can develop an understanding of the world that is on par with that of humans, it will remain unable to tackle the breadth and variety of situations that humans can.
Like, oh, I don't know- adversarial examples fooling state-of-the-art machine vision systems, or speech recognition failing for all but a very few target languages etc.
Think of it this way: driving is a translation problem.