We _know_ from innumerable studies, and just direct experience in aviation that saying “this will be done automatically” but also requiring absolute attention is not something humans can do. The only people trying to claim to the contrary are the self driving car people, and only so that when their self driving system fails they can say “the person in the driver seat is the person actually driving and it’s their fault, not our faulty software”.
This is without considering their other failure mode: disabling without warning, often immediately prior to crashing. Autopilots in aircraft can do “something’s wrong I’m disengaging and warning the pilots” because any time the autopilot is engaged and the pilots are not actively engaged with flying the aircraft they’re at altitude and have significant amounts of time to react. The few events that do require immediate responses have extremely constrained responses: essentially push down or pull up (ground proximity, stall, or TCAS alerts) - none of which is the case for road vehicles.
The time on a road vehicle between something going wrong, and impact, is generally less 3 seconds (I recall Tesla’s giving 2 seconds of notice). In that time the now driver has to become aware of the change in state, develop situational awareness, and then start to react. Then the actual correct course of action has to actually complete, which also takes time.
IMO self driving system that hands off control of the vehicle less than 10s prior to an accident occurring that it is responsible for is the fault of the manufacturer. Obviously a self driving system can’t be held responsible for an accident caused by another vehicle.
If the manufacturer’s self driving system is unable to recover from whatever is going on, it’s reasonable to give up and offload to the human in the driver’s seat, but it not reasonable to then say that they were responsible for an accident if they are unable to recover.
Again, all these nonsenses trying to avoid being in charge of the car are simply symptoms of the actual problem which is that self driving cars today are unsafe. It’s obviously fairly awful of those people to knowingly circumvent safety systems of something that they are aware is already unsafe, but it’s the manufacturers fault for selling a product that is unsafe in the first place.