Delaying self driving cars does not come at the cost of human lives, if those cars are not safer then human driver. If they are less safe with current tech, delaying then saves lives.
If they tighten regulation, they are saving lives. Also, mandating companies to put in more testing would force companies to test. Without that, they are economically motivated to make big claims, but to to not invest into reproducible quality.
The current tech is irrelevant. It is not safer than a human driver, but that's not relevant.
If regulation delays the day in the future that it is safer than human drivers and that human drivers are replaced, then it is costing lives. And it would.
The only way it wouldn't is if the regulation saves more lives in the meantime than would have been saved by having self-driving cars ubiquitous sooner, but that's tough to argue when we're already losing 3,700 per day.
The excess people killed by self driving cars matter too. Self driving is more dangerous until it is not and it is actual task of regulators to delay it until then.
And if regulators won't act, it will never be safe, because it is cheaper to produce unsafe products. It earns more to lie about safety of a product, unless you have functional regulations.
