Yes and no, that may hold true for specific mission autonomous applications e.g. metro transportation, sanitation, cargo transportation etc.

In these cases the the vehicle and to some extent the environment is much more controlled and it configured for optimal operation.

On the consumer side it's a completely different story because not only does the autonomous driver needs to outperform the human driver it needs to do so in a case when you have compound errors if the driver of the car does not trust what the auto pilot is doing you'll get into more accidents not less, and in a market environment where you have a very broad range of features you can inconsistencies which lead to more accidents.

And this is where you hit the UX issue, all autonomous drivers have to present a reliable and consistent user experience to avoid compound errors that arise for the involvement of the human (jeez that sounds eerie too natural these days) driver.

When I step into a car with an auto pilot I need to know that it will get me from A to B with minimal supervision and will on it self avoid obstacles no matter what car I step into.

If car maker A is allowed to sell it's auto pilot without collision avoidance for example while car maker B has it it will create confusion which leads to accidents, if car maker C then decides to sell an auto pilot feature which is nothing more than a glorified cruise control it can lead to even more accidents. This is why some standardization is really needed with this tech getting off the ground.

The standardization also has to go beyond sheer features it has to provide a consistent user experience across the board so things like acceleration, breaking distance, driver alerts etc. need to be more or less consistent across different cars from different manufacturers or again you'll can get an increase in accidents due to driver errors.

People are notoriously bad at statistics and will do what they can to interpret this in any way that serves them.

"Human killed by robot car" will definitely be lapped up and even if statistically it may be better than "Human killed by human driver" the one is the exception, the other the rule and so the one will get airtime.

Marketing this kind of thing properly is going to be extremely hard once the casualties start mounting (and they will, no matter how good the software is).

That's axiomatic in that we let cars kill a million people, and injure millions more every year and we haven't yet done much about that. Because we suck at statistics and we are also convinced it won't be us because we are in control of our vehicle.

But that's still a compelling number. Just as most people thought malaria was some quaint disease that inconvenienced the British Empire until Bill Gates got on it, I think road deaths are potentially at least as compelling a target, especially once people look outside Europe and North America.

> Just as most people thought malaria was some quaint disease that inconvenienced the British Empire until Bill Gates got on it

I don't think that's even remotely accurate.

That wasn't what people dying of malaria thought, but it was what people funding drug research thought, which might be more to the point.