From a statistical, macro perspective you are correct. But from the perspective of a driver this could be a hard sell.

I would say it is similar in essence to air travel. Even though commercial airline travel is way safer than driving, I'm pretty sure more people fear airline travel due to the element of having no control. Unfortunately when they release probably any automated car crash, as rare as it may be, will be played up as death by machine.

I think they will have to really play up the ability to easily override the automation (even though I doubt it will mitigate automated car crashes in that once you get used to it being successful you'll probably be reading a book when the override is actually needed)

I think they will have to really play up the ability to easily override the automation. I agree. Steamships retained masts for sails into the twentieth century, and I believe horseless carriages could still be hooked up to a team, for a while after their introduction.

We also don't have TSA checkpoints to get through just to get in our cars...

Really, it's all in the black box.

Old person hits gas instead of break, crashes into robot car. What would a human do differently? teenager runs red light, gets tboned by robot car. What would a human do differently? Child runs in front of car. What would a human do differently?

It might take a few years, but thousands of hours of video of humans making avoidable mistakes will probably change people's minds.

That would be the case if people are rational. However, people are not rational, and don't like not being in control, even if the chances of them dying are far lower. It may be safer to share the road with self-driving cars, but it's still scarier to rely on a machine that you don't understand.

The most important barriers to adoption are social, not technological, and that means that even one major catastrophe can cause a wave of backlash, regardless of whether or not it's justified.

And that's why it needs to be rock solid.

I agree that people are not rational and will fear the outliers and that the biggest barriers will be social. I'm hoping that there are very few glitches along the way, since we'll be safer if this happens. Most people feel confident about their own driving, but I think they also remember a lot of the close calls they've had.

I think—and hope—we'll be surprised at how quickly we acclimate to magic. Sure, we'll be completely freaked out by letting go of the steering wheel. Then we'll be irritated at how our car thought the leaves blowing across the road were an obstacle. Finally, we'll wonder how we ever survived our own driving and we'll mourn for those that didn't.

That would be true if we were all rational. But the chicken little behavior of us Americans over the past 11 years really demonstrates that we're not able to correctly evaluate and compare risks of minuscule magnitude.