What will happen is human-controlled cars will become $$$$$$ to ensure once Level 5 is better than humans. At that point, if you can afford it sure you can reject it but get out your wallet
Real life and ideals are different thing. You can't promise that accidents will never happen. But you can promise that accidents will be substantially reduced.
In the US, about 35k people die per year from motor vehicle related deaths. If you get it down to 10k, then that would be a major success. Of course, you will still be fine tuning until you could get below 1000 and as close to 0 as possible.
If we were actually serious about reducing motor vehicle deaths, we would mandate that every car be equipped with a breathalyzer device. No fancy new technology is necessary, and there's plenty of low-hanging fruit (Impaired driving) that we can deal with.
For some reason, though, the religion of autonomous driving does not consider this as a solution to minimizing road fatalities.
On average, humans are actually pretty good at not dying in motor vehicle related accidents - or avoiding them altogether, given the sheer number of miles traveled per day in the US.
That, however, just isn't the narrative Self-driving followers want everyone to know.
How do we go about testing this? By tallying up autonomous deaths until there are fewer per year than human drivers?
>We need to reduce those as much as possible but to demand ZERO before the technology can be used is just unrealistic
Human driver skill varies immensely by person. The idea that anyone who is (or even considers themselves to be) a "good" driver will never accept "average death rates" as a risk when getting in an autonomous car. I know I wouldn't.
The goal has to be zero or it will never be accepted by the public.