[GhostVII]

You can bring in new safety features without having full self-driving. I think the safest option is to have human drivers, with the car always monitoring to avoid any serious accidents. People will still be attentive, since they are in full control, but you avoid just as many accidents as you would if the car was driving itself.

[totalZero]

I agree. By establishing an "auto-pilot," you actually eliminate redundancy by putting the driver in a passive position. (No matter how many times you tell the driver to remain attentive)

The machine ought to be an error handler for specific failures of an active human driver (sudden braking of lead vehicle, lane straying, etc). This is the only way to get both machine and human to pay full attention. A person in a co-pilot role will struggle to react quickly enough to handle errors of the machine auto-pilot.

[LeChuck]

Yeah. This is what I always thought. If we could safe many lives with self-driving cars then we could safe many more with augmented humans.