This is ridiculous. A transmission failure and a self-driving failure have very different implications. Automatic transmissions don't have pedestrians walking through them, etc.

You say this is ridiculous but your premise that these new "self-driving" cars are "walking trough pedestrians" is even more ridiculous and not backed by any data of real world experiments currently being undertaken.

I think the point was that automatic transmissions are far simpler systems that are harder to screw up. And if you do screw them up it’s bad but not driving into pedestrians bad.

No, there’s not many self driving cars that have driven into pedestrians but Uber ATG’s car notably did, and there is certainly a lot of room for failure.

Meanwhile, humans are driving into pedestrians every minute of every day, but yes, get upset about what Tesla called their system...