It's been like a year or so, and things might have changed, but I remember reading in a blurb somewhere that both Toyota and GM were looking at not releasing self driving cars until they could do so without having any human backup in place. For the arguments you make, one, by the time an emergency happens the human isn't ready to take over, and b, there's a legal grey area in that.veen could give you chapter and verse on this, but there are different levels of autonomy and everybody but google is going for the fuzzy middle where people are supposed to intervene if things go pear-shaped. Google argues (correctly, I think), that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it - because now you're not trying to determine whether you're safe or not, you're trying to determine if you know better than the car or not.
As far as I'm concerned, "self driving car" means I can hop in, say "Okay Google take me to work", crawl into the back seat, light a spliff and stare out the sunroof until the thing parks. There's an apocryphal story from my youth about a senior citizen who buys a Winnebago upon retirement, sets it out on I-40, hits the cruise control and wanders back to the kitchenette to make a pot of coffee. That's how autopilot works on a yacht: set the heading and the throttle and you're headed to the horizon. But then, it's pretty easy to do that stuff when you don't have to worry about traffic. Uber doesn't know what to do about traffic. They're shining it on. And now there's a dead lady. I don't want to see autonomous vehicles until they're impossible to get a DUI in because you, mutherfucker, are irrevocably a goddamn passenger.