Yup, and there's also a legal point: under the law, the driver bears the responsibility for the vehicle's road worthiness. They are going to be the one careening through old people's homes if it goes wrong, after all.

If we take them out of the equation, where does the fault lie? The firm that made the automation? The fleet manager running the thing? How long exactly do you expect those parties - and more - will be batting responsibilities around the courts while people bury their dead - and there will be deaths, road traffic already accounts for a lot of deaths anyway.

The current state of play, while far from perfect, has the benefit of very simply, very obviously drawing lines about whom bears the costs of failures - because it's always the little guy. Remove them from the equation and you've got big corporates doing their best to duck responsibility right in the public eye, and people have already seen entirely too much of that.