For a subset of cases, but not all of them, as traffic safety statistics show.

Yup. Humans are allowed to make mistakes and fail fatally. If self-driving cars make a single fatal mistake, then watch out for negative press coverage for weeks. Why? Because every failure can be traced back to a root cause. Every root cause (other than something like another driver literally trying to kill you) looks like an incompetent screw-up after peeling back all the layers. In principle, self-driving cars are basically perfectly safe (as a system). So every failure causes righteous fingerpointing.

...which is also partly the motivation to improve.

I expect self-driving cars long-term to be a lot like air travel. It'll have a reputation for being super unsafe, with lots of people paranoid of it, for decades after it has far eclipsed the safety of regular human car driving. The paranoid hyper-focus and ridiculous press coverage is also what will enable it to become essentially perfect (like passenger air travel is today in the developed world).

> Yup. Humans are allowed to make mistakes and fail fatally.

It's because in almoost all cases, one fatal mistake results in one fatal accident. And in most cases, the failing party is part of the accident - giving us reason enough to believe people to what they can to avoid it.

With AI, one sloppy mistake can be the root cause of 100 fatalities, with no risk to the one who made the mistake. That's part of the reason we don't accept it.

I think you’re right that human drivers makes it a lot easier to blame the victim (even though it’s really the whole system that made it possible for the human to make such a mistake that is responsible... the system isn’t held to account because it’s just so easy to blame the human for making the proximate fatal error).