Maybe. But the promise of autonomous cars is that they can be safer than human drivers.

Sure, some small % of the populations will probably do that. Some small % of the population will drive drunk.

Neither are acceptable ways to handle the vast majority of situations one encounters.

The situation in the article. is roughly the same as being lost (or going somewhere in a way GPS won't work) and taking directions over the phone. If the line goes dead nobody (who's behavior we want self driving vehicles to emulate) just stops in the middle of the road.

“That situation” was loss of contact with a control center. What is the equivalent for people?

Perhaps dense fog, or whiteout blizzard conditions? I’m making the assumption that the server parses the data from the truck to determine what it is seeing.

No, those are sensor failures, not external communications failures.

The human equivalent would be being unable to call someone for directions.

The article says it's a person making decisions with acceptable delays of 15 seconds.

fainting. I do believe braking and stopping is better than swerving and crashing...

no, there isn't a person constantly driving on the other end of the connection