[beagleman]

You're right, and we're already benefitting and have been for years: basic electronic cruise control saves a ton of fuel just by taking the job of maintaining highway speeds away from the human.

We'll continue to benefit at each level: speed match, safe-distance maintenance, emergency brake, lane follow - there are already people alive who would be dead without them - you can find them in 5 seconds on youtube. The fact that articles have to keep trotting out same sad story of the bloke who drove into a truck while watching movies when he should have been driving tells you a lot about how safe these systems actually are - if there were dozens of counter examples, we wouldn't be hearing from the head of Toyota's RI, we'd be drowning in dashcam snuff films.

All that said, yes, I agree it's obvious that level 5 is a different beast to all of the 'easy stuff' that we have now: classic case of where the edge cases cover more area than the core of the domain does.