Trips passing floors 3, 7, or any floor in which any resident has recently taken a shower, may revert this Fully Autonomous Lifting Device to human operated mode immediately following a n assertive audio tone. Failure to correctly operate the pop-up controls during this unlikely occurrence may result in death or serious injury to you and any other passengers. Please take the time to familiarise yourself with all operating controls that will rarely if ever be required."
The designs for some of the first push button elevator circuitry was really cool tech.
It was a complicated problem because elevators could appear and disappear in a given building at will. Some would appear and operate within a building for only a few minutes. Otherwise could leave seconds after they arrived without signaling their departure. The circuitry had to account for this unreliability within the "network" of all possible elevators within a given city block.
The circuity in each elevator car also had to handle collision avoidance as new elevators appeared within the same shaft as other elevator cars that were already moving in that shaft.
It's fascinating to look at the designs:
www.archive.org/apples-and-oranges.html
Self-driving cars seem like a cake walk by comparison.
I think the real reason that elevator operators stayed on for a period of time is the same reason that some older people sometimes reject new technology, such as smartphones or in-home digital assistants, even when it ostensibly makes a lot of things easier. The same thing probably happened with push-button elevators. People didn't want to have to think about pushing buttons when they were used to just stepping into the elevator and telling the operator what floor they needed, or more likely the operator already knew.
It behaved like a chronic dud. A bad self driving car would probably develop the same reputation.
All of that begs the question of whether autonomous cars will save lives. It is always asserted that it will "because humans are such bad drivers compared to computers," but there's no actual, real-world data to back up that claim. Oh yes, some of these vehicles have been tested with millions of road miles, but that is far from the scale of billions or trillions of road miles on every kind of road under all conditions where people travel currently.