A bad driver risks his own life so he has good reasons to try to improve. A bad self driving car program doesn't risk the founders life so he has no reason to improve it if regulations doesn't force him to.

It risks the founder's net worth so there are some reasons to improve, maybe not enough.

Quitting risks their net worth more, so they have an incentive to keep at it potentially regardless of results.

It risks the founder's net worth since we ban their cars from driving if they aren't safe. If we didn't then they would continue to run unsafe programs.

Depends on the details of course but I'd expect an autonomous vehicle to be much much better at not hitting things. Especially stationary objects.

People are bad drivers because they have limited vision, limited attention, are emotional and are easily distracted by all kinds of things.

Just because an autonomous car has a similarly bad track record as the average human, doesn't mean it's ready for the road.

It may be much better. This is a single case and we get every single case reported. The problem is that computer vision is not the same as human vision and at some point we may end up with a situation close to "this car drives itself perfectly apart from running over a completely obvious, well visible person once a year". And it's going to be a really hard one to process for many people.