And finally there is even just macabre data on fatality rates. On average in the US currently about 1.2 people are expected to die in car crashes per 100 million miles driven. Tesla alone has had hundreds of millions of miles driven in its full autopilot mode, and the fatalities are not racking up like they 'should' be. We could argue that maybe people are paying more attention when the autopilot system is enabled, but practice across the industry has shown the exact opposite to be invariably true.
I think it's just been so long since our society had a revolutionary 'physical' technology, that we've become scared of change and progress. Imagine what a change it was going from horses to cars operating on internal combustion engines and relying on brakes to stop these vehicles going far faster than any horse. Or imagine the idea of stringing the entire country up with electric polls with so much energy going between them that anything landing on a wire and touching something else was certain to be killed, and accepting the fact that when these polls, or the lines between them, go down they not only could but on some occasions would start fires, and so forth. Going from human to automatically driven vehicles is a hardly meaningful contrasted against many of the revolutions of technology throughout the times.
And one final point is that we're also being somewhat self centered in this discussion. These technological changes we're seeing are happening worldwide. An image of e.g. Singapore streets with people in vehicles relaxing as they are autonomously driven to their destination would leave the state of the US and its rules and regulations looking increasingly like an anachronism. Certainly something that would cast a dim light on our view of ourselves as the world leader in innovation.