The existence of cars and airplanes (even horses) is a similar trade-off. Some people have to die for us to even have them.

Ultimately the faster we bring driverless cars to fruition, the fewer people will die, simply because it's inevitable that they will quickly exceed the safety of humans.

Then we will have turned automobile safety into an engineering problem. It was partially that before, we could package the victim better to improve their survivability, but now we can modify the driver ... every driver.