> The moment it's an order of magnitude less, then self driving car will become default.
This is rational but I don't think it's true. ~37,000 people die from car crashes every year in the US, from about ~35,000 accidents. Each individual Tesla crash that results in any serious injury or death is still a national news story. Humans are bad at estimating probability; it's hard to imagine popular support for self-driving cars if they kill thousands of people each year. Even if the alternative is tens of thousands of deaths, we have already collectively priced that in as a risk of living in a developed, automobile-driven society, such that fatal crashes never rise beyond local news.
I find it interesting that the apparent objective is to make driving safer, but apparently the powers that be have decided that it is easier to make cars that drive themselves than to convince people not to drive while drunk.
Quibbling... 28% in 2016 (https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...), but this is after decades of awareness campaigns and enforcement. Then there's the ~70% of fatal accidents that happen with sober drivers. There might not be more to be had by addressing human factors (though I personally believe graduated licenses with more rigorous testing and much higher investments in public transit would help) so the focus on self-driving vehicles may not be misguided.
You're off by some number of orders of magnitude on the accidents, unless you mean, "There are ~35,000 accidents that involve one or more fatalities (and many more that do not)."
This is rational but I don't think it's true. ~37,000 people die from car crashes every year in the US, from about ~35,000 accidents. Each individual Tesla crash that results in any serious injury or death is still a national news story. Humans are bad at estimating probability; it's hard to imagine popular support for self-driving cars if they kill thousands of people each year. Even if the alternative is tens of thousands of deaths, we have already collectively priced that in as a risk of living in a developed, automobile-driven society, such that fatal crashes never rise beyond local news.