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You might be right about the “1%” impediment, but...

There has NEVER been any technology developed that provides 100% certainty of working as advertised or as desired. The 99% that works as desired or as advertised, would still provide huge improvements over current driving, and would provide for a lot less expensive “cost of living”. Heck, people spend a large part of their lives worrying about their personal transportation, and if we removed those worries, people could/would find a lot of other endeavors to spend their lives doing.

So, tell me, how safe are people-driven vehicles now? The biggest problem with current vehicles is not the vehicles themselves, it’s the people behind the wheels of those vehicles. I would say that, the “error rate” for people-driven vehicles is many times the 1% that you mentioned.

There has NEVER been any technology developed that provides 100% certainty of working as advertised or as desired. The 99% that works as desired or as advertised, would still provide huge improvements over current driving, and would provide for a lot less expensive "cost of living."

I'm citing this from memory so my numbers may not be exact, but they do a good job of painting a picture accurately.

I read somewhere that the average American who obtained a driver's license at the age of 16-17 and drove a car regularly for 60+ years has depressed a brake pedal something like 3 million times. During that time, this average American driver has been involved in 2 or 3 crashes that would have been avoided if they had applied the brakes correctly. That represents a "failure rate" of 0.000067% to 0.0001%. You find me one mass-produced consumer product that has a failure rate this low -- and keep in mind that an auto manufacturer must IMPROVE on it in order to make an objective case that the self-driving vehicle is better than a conventional one.

The 1% I mentioned isn't a failure rate -- it's a hypothetical case of a vehicle that is almost fully autonomous, but isn't.

Eliminating 99% of a driver's functions doesn't necessarily make a car any safer. In fact, it might even make the car LESS safe if it encourages drivers to stop paying attention to the road. I use that case last year in Florida where the Tesla driver was killed when his car crashed into a truck while operating in "auto-pilot" mode. If Tesla still hasn't figured out how to detect a tractor-trailer in the roadway in front of its car, then I'd say they have a long way to go to make the technology anything remotely close to an improvement over a conventional vehicle.