Maybe what we need is to put the brakes on the notion that self-driving cars are nearly ready for prime time and in a few years they will be all over the road. A level-headed review of the state of the technology suggests that is extremely unlikely. Except for people hanging around /r/futurology and to some extent here on hacker news, who are perhaps too close to technology to really appreciate it's limits in the practical world.
It would probably be for the best if the enthusiasts and the companies rushing headlong towards this new driving paradigm put forth some effort to tone down the hype.
When the cost of them killing somebody by having a deficient QA process is minimal (and just affects shareholders), then the cars will be rolled out before they are ready.
What will happen to liability at present is still unclear but if the self driving car companies are successful in dodging most of it (and it appears they are trying) then self driving cars are going to kill a lot of people unnecessarily - quite possibly more than humans would.
The tricky part is figuring out what constitutes negligence.
Obviously this would also mean that compensation would have to go up for self driving car engineers and execs to compensate for the risk. That's fair, and, if that cost makes a self driving car venture uneconomic - again, not viable. And that's okay.
People take responsibility for other people's lives every day when they get in a car. I don't think the idea that Uber engineers should do the same should be considered particularly controversial.
If a CEO has many millions of cars running his software, their will always be a death.
In that case, nobody would want to take on that responsibility so nobody would build self driving cars.
Therefore humans will still drive cars and there will be 1000x more deaths, most preventable with self driving cars.
This is pretty much exactly the Trolley problem in ethics and philosophy. Read up on it :)
That is something that "tech" companies will in all likelihood never be able to do, since they seem uniquely designed to betray and lose the public's trust at the earliest opportunity.
"Tech" companies have become far too culturally accustomed to dishonest hype, "growth hacking", marketing BS, PR spin, etc. for their statements to be trusted, especially when there are life-and-death implications.
(of course Google did lots of ,,ungoogly'' things in the past few years, but at least they got Waymo right)
By characterising self driving cars as a "trolley problem" you have presented what is known as a "false dilemma". Maybe you could read up on that ;)
I feel that is the only way we could isolate for self driving and not other factors.