A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco

Yes, which brings us back to the point that if any cars are on the road, they should be autonomous, because autonomous cars have the potential to be far safer than humans.

They're also going to be far less reliable, we've been over this, an autonomous fire truck won't ram something out of the way because it can't make the call unless we're talking true scifi. The cars that will be left will be mostly driven by professionals which makes the gains marginal. And anyway I'm not fundamentally opposed to autonomous cars, have them if you want to cover those last 0.0001% but if you want to solve 100% with them, well, it won't work. Too expensive.

I already said all that. You're re-erecting strawmen.

it’s that pursuing increased automotive safety standards was still a worthwhile effort in parallel with building public transit,

Europe already had public transportation and walkable cities. The US doesn't. And over here btw noone (serious) is hailing autonomous driving as a revolution or solution to anything, even though Volkswagen (in the form of Audi) were the first one to produce an actual level 3 vehicle. And waymo etc. know that they couldn't get their purported "level 4" vehicles past regulations so they don't even try, having seen uber crash+burn over here with its skirting of regulations, unlike in the US they're actually getting enforced. And exist/are sensible.