Therefore, every moment you spend not actively giving me money and property and power, and persuading others to do so, is a moment in which you are actively causing harm and suffering to billions of people who would have had happiness sooner if not for your delay.
You monster.
However, conducting self-driving car development in an unsafe manner is a good way of making people oppose self-driving cars, which leads to development of self-driving technology taking longer.
"People behave rationally" is the greatest error assumed by utilitarianism, do not underestimate the reptile brain and its response to fear.
Look on the road some time. You see a lot of cars with dented bodywork, running one headlight, often poorly maintained, and depending on the make and model very cheaply made. Many of the cars may be ten years old, or older. They are often sold used, with limited warranty or dealer service.
And you really want to add self-driving to this? You think a 8 year old kia whose operator hasn't updated it because he can't afford the dealer service fees is going to be safer?
I've seen this suggested a few times, and it makes me wonder if this is caused by religious beliefs or general pessimism.
The reason is that the only way it is an unrealistic idea is if we assume that human intelligence can not possibly be matched by a machine and/or if we assume that the progress towards genera AI will be so slow that we for the intents and purposes of the debate will take very long to match it.
The only thing that will stop us from eventually matching human intelligence with machines is if there is some super-natural soul necessary to match it. Even then, for that to stop us, said soul would need to be a necessary condition to make self-driving cars safer than human, which sounds even more implausible to me, given the many advantages self-driving cars can obtain:
Additional views of the road. Benefiting from accumulated knowledge from billions of hours of driving. Potentially wireless information exchange with the other automated cars in the vicinity (can't see through the fog very well? well, maybe the 10 cars around you can fill in blanks).
I think it's a totally unrealistic idea that self-driving cars won't get to a safety level where human drivers will be outlawed on public roads.
That, uh, is what "utilitarian" means.