but self driving cars are immensely dangerous, and there’s no evidence that self driving cars will make roads safer.

This is a horrible take, and absolutely not true. Maybe for the current state of technology, but not as an always-true statement.

Humans are horrible at driving. It’s not hard to be better at driving than the average human. Perfect doesn’t exist, and computer-driven cars will always make some mistakes, but so do humans (and media will report on self-driving cars much more than on the thousands of vehicle deaths caused by human error). AEB and other technologies have already made cars much safer over the previous decades.

On top of this, I have no confidence that the odds of an error in the system (eg: a dirty sensor, software getting confused) is not higher than the odds of a system correctly braking when it needs to.

Tell me you’ve never used or tested AEB without telling me.

Dirty sensors trigger a “dirty sensor warning”, not a full emergency brake. There’s more than one sensor, and it doesn’t emergency brake on one bad sensor reading. Again, perfect doesn’t exist, but it isn’t close to the 50/50 you’re trying to portray here.

• Car brakes hard (even at 90mph), perhaps losing traction depending on road conditions

Any car with AEB will also have ABS and traction control, so losing traction is unlikely. Being rear-ended is never on the liability of the front car.

Yes, cars are dangerous, yes we need to make them safer, but we should use better policies like slower speeds, safer roads, and transitioning to smaller lighter weight cars,

Absolutely agree on all of this. Slower speeds and safer roads make accidents less likely and less lethal, for human and computer drivers both.

As such, legislation should be pushing very hard to stop self driving cars.

Legislation should push hard for setting clear boundaries on when self-driving is good enough to be allowed on the road, and where the legal responsibilities are in case of problems. Just completely stopping it would be wasted potential for safer roads for everyone in the long run.