Automating being dismissive of discussion does sound like a great idea...

> Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year. It can be done as gradually and as locally-specific as needed.

> Asshats

We already have those on the road causing accidents. Traffic rules are there to punish this exact behavior. The fact that we don't enforce a few of them makes self-driving harder. I'm not "failing to account for asshats", I'm specifically targeting them.

> Jurisdictional problems

We already have different jurisdictions where different driving requirements exist. Having self-driving cars that are only allowed to drive in country X would be nothing new.

> Technically illiterate politicians

My suggestions was specifically to make the road rules stricter and enforced. This is not a technical issue, it's the boring old issue of what the road rules should be and who should follow them.

> Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

Enforcing road rules works fine even if done gradually. It also makes self-driving gradually simpler.

> It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year.

But you mentioned two somethings: "Setting stricter traffic rules" and "having them be followed." The very first examples in the TFA were from Argo's testing i Pittsburgh:

Recently, one of the company’s cars encountered a bicyclist riding the wrong way down a busy street between other vehicles. Another Argo test car came across a street sweeper that suddenly turned a giant circle in an intersection, touching all four corners and crossing lanes of traffic that had the green light.

Setting stricter traffic rules is certainly done everywhere in the world every year. People failing to follow traffic rules is also done everywhere in the world every day, and that's the big problem. Fully autonomous driving requires the ability to make snap decisions that may have little to no precedence in your past experience. This may be a solvable problem for AI, but it's a really, really hard problem that self-driving aficionados seem to consistently underestimate.

...

ie where we want to use cars.

I don't need to go into everything that was said, you can google it. There was one thing said, however, that I think would be appropriate to touch on here. Kamen, just like you, claimed that traffic laws and the streets could be restructured to better accommodate the segway. That was the instant I knew the segway would not be taking off for a long, long time. If you need for people to restructure their laws and cities solely to accommodate your new technology, you should probably work a little bit harder on perfecting your technology. Because restructuring society's laws and transportation infrastructure simply to use your technology is probably not going to happen. The only time you get a radical restructuring of that nature is when the invention frees you from needing the infrastructure at all.

To be fair, this did happen -- with cars.

But that also sets the bar: to warrant re-architecting cities, an advance needs to be as superior to cars as cars were to horse transport.

Even restructuring a citys roadways for bicycles--a long-term, proven good technology--has been incredibly slow going. And this with something governments are actively trying to improve.

It will be decades until there is substantial enough change that self driving cars are viable as described in the great-grand-parent. And that's if it moves quickly.