"There's no ball in the middle of the road, a kid pops up from behind a car, you have 0.1 seconds to apply the brakes before you hit the kid."

It's just as easy to come up with any sort of contrived situation for which a machine would outperform a human.

Except us humans drive in the middle of the street in residential areas often below the posted speed limit just for this reason. And if we live on this street, we can better anticipate the conditions.

While I am sceptical about the hype about autonomous vehicles I fully expect them to be equally good at that long before they go mainstream.

Why?

- They aren't as easily distracted as humans,

- you can program them to stick to the rules even if slowing down results in problems for the passengers

- you can program them to care about any neighborhood, not just the ones we live in

I've seen this multiple times as a situation that people can deal with instinctively but computers won't. However people need to be trained to handle this situation; it is explicitly mentioned in the driver's handbook.† So I don't see this as a "win" for people over computers.

† CA driver's handbook page 37: http://driveca.org/cms/assets/uploads/2014/09/dl600.pdf