>The rear-ending problem will be solved as automatic emergency braking becomes standard on cars. Already, it's shipping on almost all high-end cars and 70-80% of midrange cars. There's a US auto industry goal of it being standard by 2022. That's probably the main feature needed for self-driving cars to coexist with human-driven cars.

I really wish we could just enforce proper education of being observant.

Most times when I hear about people getting rear-ended it's because the driver behind them was looking at their phone or otherwise distracted. We shouldn't invent features that allow that to continue.

On the other hand, I think this is fine in some rare cases, like maybe an accident or some other incident happens up ahead, a driver stomps their brakes, and then the person behind them who doesn't know what's happened doesn't stop soon enough. But even for the latter case, you could argue that the DMV says to keep enough distance where in most cases you should be able to still come to a stop with barely a moment's notice as long as you're paying enough attention. Of course, most people don't leave that much space much, if ever.