> I suspect the public will demand higher safety than humans to feel comfortable with these on the roads

Hasn't this ship sailed?

The people angry about self-driving cars aren't other drivers. They're people upset about displaced taxi jobs.

Not at all. I don’t care too much one way or the other for driving jobs, but I do care quite a bit about self driving car safety. They are being trained in an imperfect real world, and I don’t particularly want to find out if they ignore unmarked crosswalk laws (or other safety related stuff) as thoroughly as human drivers do.

I’m not alone. I’ve talked to plenty of people that recognize that car infrastructure is inherently unsafe in many places, the last thing I want is an incentive to have more vehicles driving around because now you don’t need humans inside the car.

Of course people care about safety. That doesn't translate to either public action nor public action requiring self-driving cars be safer than human-piloted ones. Look at every regulatory proceeding around self-driving cars, and the safety arguments are either drowned out by the jobs arguments or made principally by people motivated by job-loss concerns

My gut feeling is we're perfectly happy with self-driving cars that are even substantially worse than human-piloted ones, so long as they crash the way humans do. Rear ending in the dark, okay. Barreling full speed into a highway divider [1] or dragging pedestrians to get out of traffic [2], not.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/theres-growing-evidence...

[2] https://abc7news.com/cruise-autonomous-cars-gm-recall-sf-rob...

> My gut feeling is we're perfectly happy with self-driving cars that are even substantially worse than human-piloted ones, so long as they crash the way humans do. Rear ending in the dark, okay. Barreling full speed into a highway divider [1] or dragging pedestrians to get out of traffic [2], not.

No. I’m very not ok with this. Many human drivers are terrible. Most collisions are entirely avoidable, and I certainly don’t want more of the same from computers. If I keep getting my life put at risk more often by incompetent driverless cars, I’m going to be pissed! Maybe people that spend their time in cars agree with you, but as a cyclist and pedestrian the common accident modes are the ones that pose the greatest risk to me. Pinball off the jersey barricades all you want, but stop passing bikes too close, and plowing through crosswalks just because you can get away with it.

I’ve been hit twice on my bike, both times 100% the driver’s fault. The stakes are life and limb for me, so I absolutely do not accept a higher accident rate.

> They're people upset about displaced taxi jobs.

Eh? How many taxi jobs have these displaced? Like, I think the answer is essentially zero.