Just Waymo was driving over 1 million miles a month in 2018. How many people have they killed? The fact that an autonomous vehicle or Tesla "autopilot" fatality makes national news is telling. It's not commonplace.
The fact that many accidents involving human drivers still make the news is telling. It's not commonplace.
My point was that the statistics aren't even remotely comparable. Out of literally billions of miles driven daily across the US in all conditions, there are approximately 100 deaths nationwide. Each day, US drivers drive literally tens of thousands times more miles than all self-driving cars combined to date. There are at least 6 deaths attributable to SD cars so far...in the US, not including smaller accidents, despite driving only in optimal conditions. Scaled up per mile, self-driving cars are currently several magnitudes more dangerous than human cars.
I don't know of any statistics saying so. I've seen plenty of stats like 'self-driving in easy conditions is safer than human-driving in typical conditions'
One could even argue that adding FSD to the mix for those ideal conditions will "condition", as it were, humans to suck even more at driving exactly when human input will be required.
Meticulously mapped - the location of curbs and the like are known within an inch or so.
Today, when accidents occur, blame and liability goes to the responsible parties. We're talking about millions of accidents and millions of drivers.
If you suddenly have a car that drives, the blame and liability for all accidents then gets focused like a giant magnifying glass onto ONE (or a few) companies which have made the self-driving car.
I don't know how many accidents/mile/vehicle is the "magic number" but I expect it is going to have to be far far far lower than what it is now. Otherwise, these self-driving car vendors won't be able to survive the legal onslaught.
The legal issue you mention seems secondary to the human factors one. If people get addicted to self-driving, and some are dependent upon it, the laws will bend to the culture not the other way around, as they always do. Look at the current regime for an example of this: we gloss over the 30k fatalities that happen regularly due to cars, and hand out licenses to drive these death machines to people who really should have no right to do so given their poor driving skills or physical impediments -- we do so because to deny someone the ability to drive is so averse to culture and freedom that we err on the side of enabling more people to drive despite the fact that it surely increases the risk for everyone on the road.
The people who pay for accidents will be the same people who pay for them now. It will be the insurance companies.
I am sure that insurance companies will jump at the chance to save money, by insuring statistically safer vehicles.