I think we should solve autonomous driving before jumping multiple steps to autonomous surgery. There are many low hanging fruit in the world of automation; automated surgery is not one of them.
Autonomous surgery is probably easier to solve than driving, because the patient is lying still. Though you'd still need at least a nurse observing and a surgeon standing by. But you could have only one surgeon as backup for multiple robots in the same hospital.
A surgery is a closed task. Driving is an open ended task interacting many actors and novel challenges. It’s probably slow enough that it can visually confirm assumptions with a human operator if need be.I would bet on the autonomous surgeon over the autonomous driver any day.