It's in a human's interest to not kill him/herself.
The interests aren't aligned at all with self-driving cars. Do you think any executives, engineers or salespeople will go to jail if anyone dies? Think again.
Humans typically aren't interested in killing themselves, but their judgement can also be pretty bad. 40% of traffic fatalities involve impaired driving. In 2018 Distracted driving was attributed to 2,800 fatalities.
Uber ATG's fatal pedestrian collision was the beginning of the end for the program. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was pushed out of the company, the program has been shuttered, and one of the top engineers, Anthony Levandowski, is in jail (although Levandowski was not implicated in the accident, he's also not invulnerable).
You think Kalanick was pushed out because of the one self-driving crash, and not the sexual harassment scandals, theft of medical records, or threats to journalists?
(Of course it wasn't any of those - it was because the self-driving program wasn't anywhere close to working even ignoring all the safety problems. You can do all those things - the only thing you can't do is waste investor money.)
Travis autonomy would take a couple years. He spent some absurd sum acquiring the talent for ATG and gave them unrealistic deadlines. The program was a shit show. A pedestrian was killed, the program was stopped, Investor money was lost. While this is not the only factor leading to Kalanick's ousting, it was a big one.
The interests aren't aligned at all with self-driving cars. Do you think any executives, engineers or salespeople will go to jail if anyone dies? Think again.