There is evidence that when a self driving car is stalled in the middle of the street no one can actually figure out what they are going to do from moment to moment. No driver to yell at, doesn't respond to honking... should I go open the door and hit some big 'call mothership' button on the dash...Or will it try and run me over...

This is the standard to which the builders of autonomous vehicles wish to be held. However, this is unlikely in my opinion. I believe instead they will be held to the more rigorous standard of "is there evidence that this is dangerous?"

Note for example today's suit against Meta for alleged harms against children. No such suit against TV aimed at children or e.g. fashion magazines that are well-known to have deleterious effects on children. Autonomous vehicles are new tech, so the bar will be higher.

Given they didn't suspend Waymo, I would guess they must have been doing something so egregious that the median driver would not do.

I do not believe "it's as dangerous as a human driver" is a good reason to look past all the problems with self-driving cars. There should be a higher standard than that.

... a human driver doesn't stop in the middle of the road and become fully unresponsive when the cell phone network goes down?

A human driver at what percentile?

I think AVs need to be better than p95 or so to be socially accepted.

That is a standard that the self-driving industry likes to promulgate, I'm guessing because it's rhetorically powerful and because it suits them.

is it accepted as a standard by any professionals? Why or why not?

Specious and reductive. It's qualitative, not quantitative. Even though the latter is easier for people to understand. We have decades of data about human-caused accidents. We know the ceiling is relatively stable. We know an additional 20% of drivers won't wake up tomorrow incompetent or drunk. Anything above zero is bad, but we know and accept the status quo.

But every new model or software update will invalidate what we've observed and know about automated driving.

We're in an era of extreme obfuscation and enshittification by tech companies, even where safety is involved. I'd be more likely to trust self driving tech if I trusted the current form of the tech industry, and trusted that regulatory bodies had the power and ability to oversee them as effectively as when they were first regulating cars.

Of course even that wasn't perfect, but my trust that we can even do that well is nonexistent.

“A human driver” is not the standard, not should it be. Humans need training, experience, physical dexterity, and motivation (and more besides) to be good drivers. If you average human drivers you include barely-competent teenagers, barely-dextrous old people, drunk people, etc.

“A highly-skilled and attentive human driver” is a reasonable standard. So-called autonomous vehicles are nowhere near that.