They are
currently worse in many ways. So, perhaps the computer vision systems need to continue to improve until such time as they deliver clearly superior results to the as-observed outcomes of human drivers.
I worked on the vision system for an autonomous vehicle program in 1991, using the processing power available then. Our team held several world records at the time for different categories of completely autonomous travel on public highways.
If you fit any kind of curve between what (relatively little) we could do then for ~$200K in equipment and what a production car with < $1K of BOM costs can do today, it's reasonable to predict that well within my lifetime that vision-only autonomous driving systems could be better than a human on typical roads (absent snow cover).
