You mention focused driving, but here's a cool idea. Your subconscious which actually handles most of ur behavior and decision making and nuanced calculations gradually learns from your conscious. When you focus on things, you gradually train your subconscious to mirror that behavior and do it autonomously.
This is demonstrable by reflecting on new things you learn versus old things. Old things like walking you barely put any conscious effort in, yet once you reach a certain age the daily obstacle course that is life, which is full of tripping hazards becomes effortless to avoid ensnaring ur foot on and succumbing to a sudden tumble. But if you were to try to roller blade for the first time, suddenly you have to put massive conscious strain and focus on every movement just to avoid falling on something so simple as a slight texture change on a surface.
Also interesting thought on (conscious) spatial awareness: Here's a question is your conscious aware of things first or is your subconscious aware first? When you conscious becomes aware how sure are yah that it's not your subconscious first alerting your conscious beforehand? These are rhetorical questions which psychologists and neuroscientists already have insights about :).
Life is dangerous, but many of the dangers are predictable and the brain is adept growing to adjust to that predictability AND at learning to recognize indicators for unpredictable dangers(humans receive anxiety in these moments). In those latter situations Intelligence and consciousness is needed. Dangers that are predictable can be learned to be subconsciously handled without much worry & with much practice + experience.
Tesla autopilot is a computerized subconscious that's consciously trained by all the tesla drivers.
I strongly suspect that we'll never have level 5 autopilot with or without lidar sensors unless the computers get a human adaptable intelligence module OR some convention simplifies the environment such that new unpredictable dangers can be minimized to a miniscule and acceptable failure rate.
I think people in this debate are focusing on the wrong issues.