Am I being a pedantic numpty or am I illustrating a point about the many ways errors creep in, regardless of the natural- or artificial-ness of the intelligence?
You're being a pedantic. Human beings are tremendously better at driving than machines despite sometimes saying hexagonal rather than octagonal. Humans and current AIs both make mistakes but humans manage a kind of robustness, ability to deal gracefully with unexpected situations, that current AIs don't seem to be progressing towards.
What happened to sensor fusion? There's no reason self-driving AI has to be as unreliable as toy or research AI. People made these same FUD arguments about computer in cars decades ago. Home computers were unreliable so cars will surely crash if their brakes or throttles are controlled by computers too.
Yeah. Totally makes sense to compare a human driver driving an average 7 year old 30k$ car with not so good safety ratings driven by average person in snowy, rainy pothole ridden roads to a newish 70k$ luxury car with good airbags/crumple zones driven in mostly sunny California roads by mostly young drivers with a driver assistance system.
And then for you to argue that the driver assistance system is actually better than a human driver if given the car alone!