If it’s a life or death decision, you should opt for the best strategy, not the cheapest.
That being said, even automobiles make safety tradeoffs for cheapness or feasibility. However, we really shouldn't allow any tradeoffs for a completely unnecessary feature like "self driving". Imagine if wanting your car to have android auto or similar meant it couldn't use the lights, because a tradeoff was made.
In a life or death situation, you should opt for the system which will keep you alive more, not the one that costs less.
That’s probably also the cheapest viable strategy.
If a sensor-fusion car cuts accidents per mile (vs human) by 100x, but can only be deployed on 100,000 cars a year, and a camera-only car kills 10x more than that per mile, but can be put on 10,000,000 cars a year for the same cost, the camera-only car will end up saving 10x more people than the “better” system.
(I exaggerated both the improvement ratio and cost ratio because I like multiplying by powers of ten)
If the outcome of your safety discussion ends up suggesting a “safer”, “more expensive” solution that will definitely leave more people dead and injured then that analysis, then something is seriously wrong.
Going for absurd safety standards or expectations is absurd and self defeating. Again, as the other anon said, a practical solution that helps improve safety without handwaving material realities (cost, feasibility, adoption rates) is always better than a "safer" option that won't actually be used.
Obviously corporations try to make more money, but people also dont like buying more expensive cars.
A calculation that leads you to underdesign a product's safety and leaves no room for this product's safety improvement, in terms of mechanical or electronic update, is clearly not thought as being safe in that regard, regardless of the economies of scale or even low-term utilitarian goals (that would be expressed as: people spending money on a tesla would be safer in the short run, rather than using no automatic driving at all while waiting for a better product).
This is an important difference, and there is a societal choice to make here: do we (as society) want to buy now, and potentially have regrets later (when the safety of the product degrades with time, causing it to also have a record of people's deaths), or do we want to proactively force a notion of safety onto cars that is more than just being good enough at an arbitrary point in time, so that we hav more confidence over the long-term viability of that (societal) investment? As you can guess I gravitate towards the later, but of course it's a gradient, with several choices in-between, because pushing that thinking to an extreme would lead to stagnation, which would not do anything in terms of improving safety, as you noted.
There is no robust proof that any self-driving system outperformes a well-trained driver.
We could take that money and invest it into advanced driving lessons