Faster reaction times are "low-hanging fruit" until the reaction is wrong...
Even taking Alaskan fog banks out of the equation, a machine need to be pretty near AI-complete to not be fatally wrong about how to react more often than every few hundred 100 million miles, which is the human benchmark (including inexperienced, tired, drunk and stupid drivers) if it's driving in normal road conditions without a human failsafe. Or for the road environments to be very different, or for the 360 sensing and autobraking to be primarily driver aids, which are the real low hanging fruit for all that investment in AI processes to understand roads and control vehicles.
That’s an impressively difficult number, but I wonder where you got it from? What is a “time”? A second in dangerous conditions? A trip? How do you get a hundred million iterations of anything at human driving scale?
The rate of fatal car accidents in the US is about 1 per 1e8 miles traveled. Of course, that's a terrible measure of driver error rate: Less than 1% of all collisions are fatal and with maximally safe cars that could ensure all occupants will survive any possible collision at any possible operating speed, the worst possible driving system would receive perfect marks.
In safety-critical systems, failures are usually measured in (severity) x (probability) (and sometimes including a 'detectability' measure).
So a resulting 'acceptable' metric could factor in those less severe cases even if they occur at a higher probability. Scores outside this range would then trigger a redesign to bring it within acceptable boundaries.
I think the difficulty will be in 1) getting a consensus on what the resultant score should be and 2) getting enough information to estimate it in a statistically significant sense.
Even taking Alaskan fog banks out of the equation, a machine need to be pretty near AI-complete to not be fatally wrong about how to react more often than every few hundred 100 million miles, which is the human benchmark (including inexperienced, tired, drunk and stupid drivers) if it's driving in normal road conditions without a human failsafe. Or for the road environments to be very different, or for the 360 sensing and autobraking to be primarily driver aids, which are the real low hanging fruit for all that investment in AI processes to understand roads and control vehicles.