This would set the incentives straight at least.
For every demand they make of OTHER PEOPLE to improve the safety of travel, they are not willing to do even /10 of that.
Not if you wish to win the hearts and minds of the general population at large. As grandparent points out, the coverage seems disproportionate, but that's because it interest people, and they are generally sceptical of letting computers drive their cars.
While technically unrelated, the Boeing 737 MAX MCAS scandal hasn't done much good either for the further automation of transport systems.
People dying at the 'hands' of AVs will lead to pushback from the general population, and political points can be scored by siding with this view, leading to tigther regulation if not an outright ban some places on AVs.
The real question is; will either the slow and thorough approach or the quick and dirty approach roll out larger AV fleets faster than the other? In any case, it'll probably be decades, before there are significant AV fleets.
But the car was such a valuable and exciting technological leap that people just lived with the risks.
It'll be the same here too, if the technology is valuable and life changing.
We all know that the fastest and most reliable way to find and fix bugs is to implement the thing in production and see what happens. As you point out, it exposes problems that testing and design just can't.
I see people here obsessing over how much will change if we had fleets of AVs. Maybe shaving five years off the wait time is worth N number of human lives. Especially if N < the number of lives will ultimately be saved if the technology is perfected years earlier.
Of course I wouldn't want myself or my loved ones to make that sacrifice. I don't want to die in a regular car accident either. Given the upside, speeding up AV development may be worth the risk?