I don’t think the analogy between vaccines and self-driving cars is apt, for a couple of reasons.

What people don’t understand about autonomy is how strong the Pareto Principle is here. It seems like driverless cars are “almost there”, but the cases they can’t handle are really, REALLY hard. I’m a believer that artificial general intelligence is possible in principle, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near autonomous driving technology that can make a car go anywhere a human can drive it.

Additionally, some companies (Tesla is one, Waymo isn’t) are submitting innocent bystanders to their experimentation with unconscionably little concern for safety protocols. If this were a vaccine, would you be okay with the drug company inoculating random people without their knowledge or consent? I’m fine with cities banning driverless cars from companies that don’t meet a very high standard of caution in how they verify and roll out new updates.

Last, autonomous cars are vastly more expensive than vaccines. Even if the perfect driverless car existed, it would take probably 1,000 to 10,000 times more money to replace the human-driven fleet than it would to vaccinate everybody. The number of lives saved might be the same, but the cost matters. At that price, you have to seriously consider whether you could save even more lives with different spending priorities.