Instead of trying to make self driving cars better...
...we should be worried about how to reduce the number of cars as much as possible.
It should be clear by now, that individual traffic has horrible scaling. Anyone who doubts that, should take a look at how much of our urban "living-space" is actually "car-space".
This idea has been let go on for so long that this invasion of our living space is now normalized to the point where school children learn that most of the public space is reserved for cars. They learn that this is normal, and don't ever question that, just stay on your ever smaller slice of walkway while we build 3, no 4, no 6, no 8 lane streets rights through the middle of the places where people are supposed to live, and devote ever more prime real estate to parking lots. Oh did I mention that lots of areas don't even have walkways any more? What, "walking" through suburbs? With my feet? What a strange idea. Next you want me to be able to shop for groceries within walking distance of my house instead of having to drive for 20 minutes in each direction.
And that is just the wasted space. We haven't even mentioned the absurd energy inefficency of moving 2t vehicles to transport one 80kg person. It doesn't matter if they are powered by gasoline, hydrogen, batteries or chicken farts, it is a giant waste of power that could be put to better use elsewhere.
Coming back to the scaling problem, individual trafficis like trying to run the internet not by using data centers, but by relying on every resource being served from home computers connected via intermittent dial up modems. Sure, it would work somewhat, but it would also be horribly slow, inefficient, and forget about building really big things with it.
The sooner we give up on this nonsense, and divert the resources into building dense, reliable and affordable public transport systems, the better.
And since this "counter argument" is almost inevitable: Yes, I am aware that there are use cases where a motor vehicle is the only option. I'm not calling for the abolishment of motor vehicles.