There’s another issue too. In perfect conditions, self-driving cars are a lot safer, but they aren’t 100% safe. So when an incident occurs it’s newsworthy. (In the same way that we hear about plane crashes anywhere in the world, but won’t necessarily hear about someone getting run over in the next city).

My hypothesis is that adoption would be throttled in even near perfect conditions. Just because we’ve internalised the risks of driving, but haven’t for the risks of being driven by a computer.

All that, and you may have left out the most damaging of all… Trump will likely pull the US out of Copenhagen, leaving no chance of limiting temps below 2C let alone getting anywhere near 1.5C. The excess deaths from this will likely dwarf COVID.