We don't usually switch to a new technology unless it's > 120% better than what exists today. The cool factor will not be enough for practical adoption.

tons of technology is used for lesser marginal gains. no clue where you got this idea from.

I absolutely disagree. It can't be better than humans. It needs to be flawless. Any problems where people get killed will delay public acceptance of the technology by decades, even if "statistically it's safer than humans". People don't give a damn about statistics, they give a damn about tabloids shouting "self driving cars kill another innocent person!!!". We literally can't afford that.

If the aim is to have a technology that's 100% fail-safe, we can stop pursuing self-driving cars now. We can in fact stop pursuing any kind of technology because the economic cost of making anything completely fail-safe are usually prohibitive. Also, isn't history ripe with counter examples to your argument? Planes have crashed, people died, tabloid headlines were written about it, and people still fly, probably because it's awfully convenient.

Yes, and every time there's a plane crash while on autopilot, Boeing/Airbus will order that every single plane of that type is grounded until the fix is found. For airlines it's not a huge deal since they have insurance for that kind of thing and they can always use other planes they have or rent them to subsitute in their schedules. Now imagine if there are hundreds of thousands of say self-driving Teslas(or any other brand) and your national safety regulator orders that they are all disabled until a fix is found after a particularly nasty crash. If you get up in the morning and can't use your car because it has been remotely disabled for whatever reason, you will be furious - or at least I know I would be. I'd sell it and buy a normal manual car the same day.

My point is, that all of this affects the public perception of self-driving cars - and if we want them to succeed, we need to make absolutely sure that that perception is good. We can't have the nonsense Tesla is trying to pull off at the moment, where they call their system "autopilot" but they know the system cannot detect obstacles at around pillar-height and it gets blinded by the sun and can swerve into the oncoming lane before just switching off. These are not theoretical problems - both happen in cars that are out there, right now. And if it happens to a regular Joe Smith, then Mr. Smith will think the technology is crap, and we can't let that happen.

Also, demonstrably safer than driving, by time or by distance.

After a long history of fatalities and fixes.

So you're saying we should let more people die (via human driving) to avoid people getting upset over tabloids ignoring statistics?

It seems like the person you're responding to believes that the deaths from low-quality self-driving cars will cause the technology to not come to fruition, saving less lives in the long run.

We are already "letting more people die" for economic reasons. We could mandate that all cars on the road should have the most modern 15+ airbag systems, but it's too costly. We could mandate that the speed limit should be 30mph and limited in hardware, but it's too costly economically, yet I don't think anyone can argue that it wouldn't save lives.

We make these exact choices all the time. I am saying we should "let more people die" now, so that we can save more later. That's not a novel concept.

Right? Every single economic decision we make could be framed as a 'letting people die' choice.

Then that's our own fault for being too stupid to have self-driving cars.

Ideally, we should embrace them even if they are slightly more dangerous than human drivers, because we are getting the benefit of the time that would otherwise be spent driving.

I think there's real-world evidence that this is not the case. There have already been deaths due to Autopilot, and the reaction you're describing here didn't happen.